HX 
266 
L13dE 


T  TO  BE  Lazy 
OTHER  Studies 


PAUL  LAFARGUE       l 


man 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


THE 
RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

AND  OTHER  STUDIES 


BY 
PAUL  LAFARGUE 


Translated  by  CHARLES  H.  KERR 


CHICAGO 

CHARLES  H.  KERR  &  COMPANTi 


Copyright,  1907 
By  Charles  H.  Kerr  &  Company 


PREFACE 

M.  Thiers,  at  a  private  session  of  the  com- 
Jiission  on  primary  education  of  1849,  said :  "I 
wish  to  make  the  influence  of  the  clergy  all- 
powerful  because  I  count  upon  it  to  propagate 
that  good  philosophy  which  teaches  man  that  he 
is  here  below  to  suffer,  and  not  that  other  philos- 
ophy which  on  the  contrary  bids  man  to  enjoy." 
M.  Thiers  was  stating  the  ethics  of  the  capital- 
ist class,  whose  fierce  egoism  and  narrow  intel- 
ligence he  incarnated. 

The  Bourgeoisie,  when  it  was  struggling 
against  the  nobility  sustained  by  the  clergy, 
hoisted  the  flag  of  free  thought  and  atheism ;  but 
once  triumphant,  it  changed  its  tone  and  manner 
and  today  it  uses  religion  to  support  its  economic 
and  political  supremacy.  In  the  fifteenth  and  six- 
teenth centuries,  it  had  joyfully  taken  up  the 
pagan  tradition  and  glorified  the  flesh  and  its 
passions,  reproved  by  Christianity;  in  our  days, 
gorgeci  with  goods  and  with  pleasures,  it  denies 


-1  C^ooir^^ 


4  PREFACE 

the  teachings  of  its  thinkers  like  Rabelais  and 
Diderot,  and  preaches  abstinence  to  the  wage- 
workers.  Capitalist  ethics,  a  pitiful  parody  on 
Christian  ethics,  strikes  with  its  anathema  the 
flesh  of  the  laborer;  its  ideal  is  to  reduce  the 
producer  to  the  smallest  number  of  needs,  to 
suppress  his  joys  and  his  passions  and  to  con- 
demn him  to  play  the  part  of  a  machine  turning 
out  work  without  respite  and  without  thanks. 

The  revolutionary  socialists  must  take  up 
again  the  battle  fought  by  the  philosophers  and 
pamphleteers  of  the  bourgeoisie ;  they  must 
march  up  to  the  assault  of  the  ethics  and  the 
social  theories  of  capitalism ;  they  must  demolish 
in  the  heads  of  the  class  which  they  call  to  ac- 
tion the  prejudices  sown  in  them  by  the  ruling 
class;  they  must  proclaim  in  the  faces  of  the 
hypocrites  of  all  ethical  systems  that  the  earth 
shall  cease  to  be  the  vale  of  tears  for  the  laborer ; 
that  in  the  communist  society  of  the  future, 
which  we  shall  establish  "peaceably  if  we  may, 
forcibly  if  we  must,"  the  impulses  of  men  will 
be  given  a  free  rein,  for  "all  these  impulses  are 
by  nature  good,  we  have  nothing  to  avoid  but 
their  misuse  and  their  excesses,*"  and  they  will 
not  be  avoided  except  by  their  mutual  counter- 


•  Deccartae.     "L««  Passions  de  I'ame.' 


PREFACE  3 

balancing,  by  the  harmonious  development  of 
the  human  organism,  for  as  Dr.  Beddoe  says, 
"It  is  only  when  a  race  reaches  its  maximum 
of  physical  development,  that  it  arrives  at  its 
highest  point  of  energy  and  moral  vigor."  Such 
was  also  the  opinion  of  the  great  naturalist 
Charles  Darwin.* 

This  refutation  of  the  "Right  to  Work"  which 
I  am  republishing  with  some  additional  notes  ap- 
peared in  the  weekly  "Egalite",  1880,  second 
series.  P.  L. 

Saint e-Pelagie  Prison,  1883. 


♦  Doctor    Beddoo.     "Memoirs    of    the    Anthropological    So- 
ciety." 

Charles  Darwin.    "Descent  of  Man." 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 

Page 
THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY— 

I.     A  Disastrous   Dogma 9 

II.     Blessings  of  Worl? 14 

III.  The  Conseriuences  of  Over-Production 30 

IV.  New  Songs  to  New  Music 48 

Appendix 57 

SOCIALISM  AND  THE   INTELLECTUALS 63 

THE  BANKRUPTCY  OF  CAPITALISM 105 

THE   WOMAN   QUESTION Ill 

THE   SOCIALIST   IDEAL 139 

THE   RIGHTS  OF  THE   HORSE  AND   THE   RIGHTS 

OF  MAN 157 

7 


THE 
RIGHT  TO   BE  LAZY 


Let  us  be  lazy  in  everything,  except  In  lov- 
ing and  drinking,   except   in   being  lazy. 

—Leasing. 


A   DISASTROUS   DOGMA. 

A  Strange  delusion  possesses  the  working  clas- 
ses of  the  nations  where  capitalist  civilization 
holds  its  sway.  This  delusion  drags  in  its  train 
the  individual  and  social  woes  which  for  two 
centuries  have  tortured  sad  humanity.  This 
delusion  is  the  love  of  work,  the  furious  passion 
for  work,  pushed  even  to  the  exhaustion  of  the 
vital  force  of  the  individual  and  his  progeny. 
Instead  of  opposing  this  mental  aberration,  the 
priests,  the  economists  and  the  moralists  have 
cast  a  sacred  halo  over  work.  Blind  and  finite 
men,  they  have  wished  to  be  wiser  than  their 
God;  weak  and  contemptible  men,  they  have 
fi 


10  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

presumed  to  rehabilitate  what  their  God  had 
cursed.  I,  who  do  not  profess  to  be  a  Christ- 
ian, an  economist  or  a  moraHst,  I  appeal  from 
their  judgement  to  that  of  their  God ;  from  the 
preachings  of  their  religious,  economics  or  free- 
thought  ethics,  to  .the  frightful  consequences  of 
work  in  capitalist  society. 

In  capitalist  society  work  is  the  cause  of 
all  intellectual  degeneracy,  of  all  organic 
deformity.  Compare  the  thorough-bred  in 
Rothschild's  stables,  served  by  a  retinue  of  bi- 
peds, with  the  heavy  brute  of  the  Norman  farms 
which  plows  the  earth,  carts  the  manure,  hauls 
the  crops.  Look  at  the  noble  savage  whom  the 
missionaries  of  trade  and  the  traders  of  religion 
have  not  yet  corrupted  with  Christianity,  syph- 
ilis and  the  dogma  of  work,  and  then  look  at  our 
miserable  slaves  of  machines.* 


*  European  explorers  pause  in  wonder  before  the 
physical  beauty  and  the  proud  bearing  of  the  men  of 
primitive  races,  not  soiled  by  what  Paepplg  calls  "the 
poisonous  breath  of  civilization."  Speaking  of  the  ab- 
origines of  the  Oceanic  Islands,  Lord  George  Campbell 
writes:  "There  is  not  a  people  in  the  world  which 
strikes  one  more  favorably  at  first  sight.  Their 
smooth  skin  of  a  light  copper  tint,  their  hair  golden 
and  curly,  their  beautiful  and  happy  faces,  in  a  word, 
their  whole  person  formed  a  new  and  splendid  speci- 
men of  the  'genus  homo';  their  physical  appearance 
gave  the  impression  of  a  race  superior  to  ours."  The 
civilized  men  of  ancient  Rome,  witness  Caesar  and 
Tacitus,  regarded  with  the  same  admiration  the  Ger- 
mans of  the  communist  tribes  which  invaded  the  Ro- 
man empire.  Following  Tacitus,  Salvien,  the  priest  of 
the  fifth  century  who  received  the  surname  of  master 
of  the  Bishops,  held  up  the  barbarians  as  an  example 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  11 

When,  in  our  civilized  Europe,  we  would  find 
a  trace  of  the  native  beauty  of  man,  we  must 
go  seek  it  in  the  nations  where  economic  prejud- 
ices have  not  yet  uprooted  the  hatred  of  work. 
Spain,  which,  alas,  is  degenerating,  may  still 
boast  of  possessing  fewer  factories  than  we  have 
of  prisons  and  barracks ;  but  the  artist  rejoices 
in  his  admiration  of  the  hardy  Andalusian,  brown 
as  his  native  chestnuts,  straight  and  flexible  as  a 
steel  rod ;  and  the  heart  leaps  at  hearing  the  beg- 


to  civilized  Oiristians:  "We  are  immodest  before  the 
barbarians,  ■who  are  more  chaste  than  we.  Even  niore> 
the  barbarians  are  wounded  at  our  lack  of  modesty; 
the  Goths  do  not  permit  debauchees  of  their  own  na- 
tion to  remain  among  them;  alone  in  the  midst  of 
them,  by  the  sad  privilege  of  their  nationality  and 
their  name,  the  Romans  have  the  right  to  be  impure. 
(Pederasty  was  then  the  height  of  the  fashion  among 
both  pagans  and  Christians.)  The  oppressed  fly  to  the 
barbarians  to  seek  for  mercy  and  a  shelter."  (De 
Gubernatione  Dei.)  The  old  civilization  and  the  rising 
Christianity  corrupted  the  barbarians  of  the  ancient 
world,  as  the  old  Christianity  and  the  modern  capital- 
ist civilization  are  corrupting  the  savages  of  the  new 
world. 

M.  P.  LePlay,  whose  talent  for  observation  must  be 
recognized,  even  if  we  reject  his  sociological  conclu- 
sions, tainted  w^ith  philanthropic  and  Christian  Phari- 
saism, says  in  his  book  "Les  Ouvriers  Europ^ens" 
(1885):  "The  Propensity  of  the  Bachkirs  for  laziness 
(the  Bachkirs  are  semi-nomadic  shepherds  of  the  Asi- 
atic slope  of  the  Ural  mountains) ;  the  leisure  of  nom- 
adic life,  the  habit  of  meditation  which  this  engenders 
In  the  best  endowed  individuals,— all  this  often  gives 
them  a  distinction  of  manner,  a  fineness  of  intelligence 
and  judgement  which  is  rarely  to  be  observed  on   the 

same    social   level    in    a   more   developed   civilization 

The  thing  most  repugnant  to  them  is  agricultural 
labor:  they  will  do  anything  rather  than  accept  the 
trade  of  a  farmer."  Agriculture  is  in  fact  the  first  ex- 
ample of  servile  labor  in  the  history  of  man.  Accord- 
ing to  biblical  tradition,  the  first  criminal,  Cain,  Is  ft 
farmer. 


12  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

gar,  superbly  draped  in  his  ragged  capa,  parleying 
on  terms  of  equality  with  the  duke  of  Ossuna. 
For  the  Spaniard,  in  whom  the  primitive  animal 
has  not  been  atrophied,  work  is  the  worst  sort 
of  slavery.*  The  Greeks  in  their  era  of  great- 
ness had  only  contempt  for  work:  their  slaves 
alone  were  permitted  to  labor:  the  free  man 
knew  only  exercises  for  the  body  and  mind.J 
And  so  it  was  in  this  era  that  men  like  Aristotle, 
Phidias,  Aristophanes  moved  and  breathed 
among  the  people ;  it  was  the  time  when  a  hand- 
ful of  heroes  at  Marathon  crushed  the  hordes 
of  Asia,  soon  to  be  subdued  by  Alexander.  The 
philosophers  of  antiquity  taught  contempt  for 
work,  that  degradation  of  the  free  man,  the  poets 
sang  of  idleness,  that  gift  from  the  Gods : 
O  Melibae  Deus  nobis  haec  otia  fecit,  f 
Jesus,  in  his  sermon  on  the  Mount,  preached 
idleness:  [_^Consider  the  lilies  of  the  field,  how 
they  grow :  they  toil  not,  neither  do  they 
spin :  and  yet  I  say  unto  you  that  even  Solomon 
in  all  his  glory  was  not  arrayed  like  one  of 
these. 'M  Jehovah  the  bearded  and  angry  god,  gave 
his    worshipers   the    supreme   example   of    ideal 


•The  Spanish  proverb  says:  Descanzar  es  salud. 
(Rest   is   healthful.) 

+  O  Mellbaeus!  a  god  has  granted  us  this  idleness. 
Virgil's  Bucolics.    (See  appendix.) 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  13 

laziness;  after  six  days  of  work,  he  rests  for  all 
eternity. 

On  the  other  hand,  what  are  the  races  for 
which  work  is  an  organic  necessity?  The 
Auvergnians;  the  Scotch,  those  Auvergnians  of 
the  British  Isles;  the  GaHcians,  those  Auvergn- 
ians of  Spain;  the  Pomeranians,  those  Auvergn- 
ians of  Germany ;  the  Chinese,  those  Auvergnians 
of  Asia.  In  our  society,  which  are  the  classes 
that  love  work  for  work's  sake?  The  peasant 
proprietors,  the  little  shopkeepers;  the  former 
bent  double  over  their  fields,  the  latter  crouched 
in  their  shops,  burrow  like  the  mole  in  his  sub- 
terranean passage  and  never  stand  up  to  look  at 
nature  leisurely. 

And  meanwhile  the  proletariat,  the  great  class 
embracing  all  the  producers  of  civilized  nations, 
the  class  which  in  freeing  itself  will  free  human- 
ity from  servile  toil  and  will  make  of  the  human 
animal  a  free  being,  —  the  proletariat,  betraying 
its  instincts,  despising  its  historic  mission,ihas 
let  itself  be  perverted  by  the  dogma  of  work.j 
Rude  and  terrible  has  been  its  punishment.  All 
its  individual  and  social  woes  are  born  of  its 
passion  for  work. 


14  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

II. 

BLESSINGS  OF  WORK. 

In  1770  at  London,  an  anonymous  pamphlet 
appeared  under  the  title,  "An  Essay  on  Trade 
and  Commerce".  It  made  some  stir  in  its  time. 
The  author,  a  great  philanthropist,  was  indignant 
that  "the  factory  population  of  England  had 
taken  into  its  head  the  fixed  idea  that  in  their 
quality  of  Englishmen  all  the  individuals  compos- 
ing it  have  by  right  of  birth  the  privilege  ol 
being  freer  and  more  independent  than  the  labor- 
ers of  any  country  in  Europai  This  idea  may 
have  its  usefulness  for  soldiers,  since  it  stimuli 
ates  their  valor,  but  the  less  the  factory  workers 
are  imbued  with  it  the  better  for  themselves  and 
the  state.  Laborers  ought  never  to  look  on 
themselves  as  independent  of  their  superiors. 
It  is  extremely  dangerous  to  encourage  such  in^ 
fatuations  in  a  commercial  state  like  ours,  where 
perhaps  seven-eighths  of  the  population  have  lit- 
tle or  no  property.  The  cure  will  not  be  complete 
until  our  industrial  laborers  are  contented  to 
work  six  days  for  the  same  sum  which  they  now 
earn  in  four."  Thus,  nearly  a  century  before 
Guizot,[^work  was  openly  preached  in  London  as 
a  curb  to  the  noble  passions  of  man^  ''The  more 
my  people  work,  the  less  vices  they  will  have'V 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  15 

wrote  Napoleon  on  May  5th,  1807,  from  Osterod. 
"I  am  the  authority.  . .  .and  I  should  be  disposed 
to  order  that  on  Sunday  after  the  hour  of  service 
be  past,  the  shops  be  opened  and  the  laborers 
return  to  their  work."  To  root  out  laziness  and 
curb  the  sentiments  of  pride  and  independence 
which  arise  from  it,  the  author  of  the  ""Essay 
on  Trade"  proposed  to  imprison  the  poor  in 
ideal  "work-houses",  which  should  become 
"houses  of  terror,  where  they  should  work  four- 
teen hours  a  day  in  such  fashion  that  when  meal 
time  was  deducted  there  should  remain  twelve 
hours  of  work  full  and  complete". 

Twelve  hours  of  work  a  day,  that  is  the  ideal 
of  the  philanthropists  and  moralists  of  the  eight- 
eenth century.  How  have  we  outdone  this  nee 
plus  ultra!  Modern  factories  have  become  ideal 
houses  of  correction  in  which  the  toiling  masses 
are  imprisoned,  in  which  they  are  condemned 
to  compulsory  work  for  twelve  or  fourteen  hours, 
not  the  men  only  but  also  women  and  children.* 
And  to  think  that  the  sons  of  the  heroes  of  the 
Terror  have  allowed  themselves  to  be  degraded 


♦  At  the  first  Congress  of  Charities  held  at  Brussels 
in  1857  one  of  the  richest  manufacturers  of  Marquette, 
near  Lille,  M.  Scrive,  to  the  plaudits  of  the  membera 
of  the  congress  declared  with  the  noble  satisfaction 
of  a  duty  performed:  "We  have  introduced  certain 
methods  of  diversion  for  the  children.  We  teach  thera 
to  sing  during  their  work,  also  to  count  while  work- 


16  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

by  the  religion  of  ^yoJ^k,  to  the  point  of  accept- 
ing, since  1848,  as  a  revolutionary  conquest,  the 
law  limiting  factory  labor  to  twelve  hours.  They 
proclaim  as  a  revolutionary  principle  the  Right 
to  Work.  Shame  to  the  French  proletariat! 
Only  slaves  would  have  been  capable  of  such 
baseness.  A  Greek  of  the  heroic  times  would 
have  required  twenty  years  of  capitalist  civiliza- 
tion before  he  could  have  conceived  such  vile- 
ness. 

And  if  the  miseries  of  compulsory  work  and 
the  tortures  of  hunger  have  descended  upon 
the  proletariat  more  in  number  than  the  locusts 
of  the  Bible,  it  is  because  the  proletariat  itself 
invited  them.  This  work,  which  in  June  1848 
the  laborers  demanded  with  arms  in  their  hands, 
this  they  have  imposed  on  their  families ;  they 
have  delivered  up  to  the  barons  of  industry  their 
wives  and  children.  With  their  own  hands  they 
have  demolished  their  domestic  hearths.  With 
their  own  hands  they  have  dried  up  the  milk  of 
their  wives.  The  unhappy  women  carrying  and 
nursing  their  babes  have  been  obliged  to  go  into 


Ing.  That  distracts  them  and  makes  them  accept 
bravely  "those  twelve  hours  of  labor  which  are  neces- 
sary to  procure  their  means  of  existence."  Twelve 
hours  of  labor,  and  such  labor,  imposed  on  children 
less  than  twelve  years  old!  The  materialists  will  al- 
ways regret  that  there  is  no  hell  in  which  to  confine 
these  Christian  philanthropic  murderers  of  childhood. 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  17 

the  mines  and  factories  to  bend  their  backs  and 
exhaust  their  nerves.  With  their  own  hands 
they  have  broken  the  Hfe  and  the  vigor  of  their 
children.  Shame  on  the  proletarians!  Where 
are  those  neighborly  housewives  told  of  in  our 
fables  and  in  our  old  tales,  bold  and  frank  of 
speech,  lovers  of  Bacchus?  Where  are  those 
buxom  girls,  always  on  the  move,  always  cook- 
ing, always  singing,  always  spreading  life,  en- 
gendering life's  joy,  giving  painless  birth  to 
healthy  and  vigorous  children  ?  .  . .  .  (Today  we 
have  factory  girls  and  women,  pale  drooping 
flowers,  with  impoverished  blood,  with  disord- 
ered stomachs,  with  languid  limbs  ....  They 
have  never  known  the  pleasure  of  a  healthful 
passion,  nor  would  they  be  capable  of  telling 
of  it  merrily  !J  And  the  children  ?  Twelve  hours 
of  work  for  children!  O,  misery.  But  not  all 
the  Jules  Simon  of  the  Academy  of  Moral  and 
Political  Science,  not  all  the  Germinys  of  Jesuit- 
ism, could  have  invented  a  vice  more  degrading 
to  the  intelligence  of  the  children,  more  cor- 
rupting of  their  instincts,  more  destructive  of 
their  organism  than  work  in  the  vitiated  atmos- 
phere of  the  capitalist  factory. 
(jOur  epoch  has  been  called  the  century  of 
work.  It  is  in  fact  the  century  of  pain,  misery 
and  corruption7\ 


|9  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

And  all  the  while  the  philosophers,  the  bourge* 
ois  economists — from  the  painfully  confused 
August  Comte  to  the  ludicrously  clear  Leroy- 
Beaulieu;  the  people  of  bourgeois  literature — 
from  the  quackishly  romantic  Victor  Hugo  to 
the  artlessly  grotesque  Paul  de  Kock, — all  have 
intoned ;  nauseating  songs  in  honor  of  the  god 
Progress,  the  eldest  son  of  Work^  Listen  to 
them  and  you  would  think  that  happiness  was 
soon  to  reign  over  the  earth,  that  its  coming 
was  already  perceived.  They  rummaged  in  the 
dust  of  past  centuries  to  bring  back  feudal  miser- 
ies to  serve  as  a  sombre  contrast  to  the  delights 
of  the  present  times.  Have  they  wearied  us, 
these  satisfied  people,  yesterday  pensioners  at  the 
table  of  the  nobility,  today  pen-valets  of  the 
capitalist  class  and  fatly  paid?  Have  they  reck- 
oned us  weary  of  the  peasant,  such  as  La  Bruyere 
described  him?  Well,  here  is  the  brilliant  pict- 
ure of  proletarian  delights  in  the  year  of  capital- 
ist progress  1840,  penned  by  one  of  their  own 
men,  Dr.  Villerme,  member  of  the  Institute,  the 
same  who  in  1848  was  a  member  of  that  scient- 
ific society  (Thiers,  Cousin,  Passy,  Blanqui,  the 
academician,  were  in  it),  which  disseminated 
among  the  masses  the  nonsense  of  bourgeois 
economics  and  ethics. 

It  is  of  manufacturing  Alsace  that  Dr.  Vil- 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  19 

lerme  speaks, — the  Alsace  of  Kestner  and  Doll- 
fus,  those  flowers  of  industrial  philanthropy  and 
republicanism.  But  before  the  doctor  raises  up 
before  us  his  picture  of  proletarian  miseries,  let 
us  listen  to  an  Alsatian  manufacturer,  Mr.  Th. 
Mieg,  of  the  house  of  Dollfus,  Mieg  &  Co., 
depicting  the  condition  of  the  old-time  artisan: 
"At  Mulhouse  fifty  years  ago  (in  1813,  when 
modern  mechanical  industry  was  just  arising) 
the  laborers  were  all  children  of  the  soil,  in- 
habiting the  town  and  the  surrounding  villages, 
and  almost  all  owning  a  house  and  often  a  little 
field."*  It  was  the  golden  age  of  the  laborer. 
But  at  that  time  Alsatian  industry  did  not  deluge 
the  world  with  its  cottons,  nor  make  millionaires 
out  of  its  Dollfus  and  Koechlin.  But  twenty-five 
years  after,  when  Villerme  visited  Alsace,  the 
modern  Minotaur,  the  capitalist  workshop,  had 
conquered  the  country  /in  its  insatiable  appetite 
for  human  labor  it  had  dragged  the  workmen 
from  their  hearths,  the  better  to  wring  them  and 
press  out  the  labor  which  they  contained.)  It 
was  by  thousands  that  the  workers  flocked  to- 
gether at  the  signal  of  the  steam  whistle.  "A 
great   number"^    says    Villerme,    "five   thousand 


•  Speech  delivered  before  the  International  Society 
of  Practical  Studies  in  Social  Economics,  at  Paris  In 
May  1863.  and  published  in  the  French  "Economist" 
of  the  same  epoc^v 


90  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

out  of  seventeen  thousand,  were  obliged  by  his:^ 
rents  to  lodge  in  neighboring  villages.  Some 
of  them  lived  three  or  four  miles  from  the  fac- 
tory where  they  worked.* 

"At  Mulhouse  in  Dornach,  work  began  at  five 
o'clock  in  the  morning  and  ended  at  eight  o'clock 
in  the  evening,  summer  and  winter.  It  was  a 
sight  to  watch  them  arrive  each  morning  into 
the  city  and  depart  each  evening.  'Among  them 
were  a  multitude  of  women,  pale,  often  walk- 
ing bare-footed  through  the  mud,  and  who  for 
lack  of  umbrellas  when  the  rain  or  snow  fell, 
wore  their  aprons  or  skirts  turned  up  over  their 
heads.  There  was  a  still  larger  number  of 
young  children,  equally  dirty,  equally  pale, 
covered  with  rags,  greasy  from  the  machine  oil 
which  drops  on  them  while  they  work.  They 
were  better  protected  from  the  rain  because 
their  clothes  shed  water;  but  unlike  the  women 
just  mentioned,  they  did  not  carry  their  day's 
provisions  in  a  basket,  but  they  carryed  in  their 
hands  or  hid  under  their  clothing  as  best  they 
might,  the  morsel  of  bread  which  must  serve 
them  as  food  until  time  for  them  to  return 
home. 

Thus    to    the    strain  of  an  insufferably  long 


♦  Note  that  this  was  before  the  era  of  railroads  and 
street  cars.  (Translator.) 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  31 

day  —at  least  fifteen  hours — is  added  for  these 
wretches  the  fatigue  of  the  painful  daily  jour- 
neys. (Consequently  they  reach  home  over- 
whelmed by  the  need  of  sleep,  and  next  day  they 
rise  before  they  are  completely  rested  in  ordei 
to  reach  the  factory  by  the  opening  time.". 

Now,  look  at  the  holes  in  which  were  packed 
those  who  lodge  in  the  town :  "I  saw  at  Mul- 
house  in  Dornach,  and  the  neighboring  houses, 
some  of  those  miserable  lodgings  where  two 
families  slept  each  in  its  corner  on  straw  thrown 
on  the  floor  and  kept  in  its  place  by  two  planks. 
....This  wretchedness  among  the  laborers  of 
the  cotton  industry  in  the  department  of  the  up- 
per Rhine  is  so  extreme  that  it  produces  this 
sad  result,  that  while  in  the  families  of  the 
manufacturers,  merchants,  shop-keepers  or 
factory  superintendents,  half  of  the  children 
reach  their  twenty-first  year,  this  same  half 
ceases  to  exist  before  the  lapse  of  two  years  in 
the  families  of  weavers  and  cotton  spinners." 

Speaking  of  the  labor  of  the  workshop,  Vil- 
lerme  adds :  "It  is  not  a  work,  a  task,  it  is 
a  torture  and  it  is  inflicted  on  children  of  six 
to  eight  years.  It  is  this  long  torture  day  after 
day  which  wastes  away  the  laborers  in  the  cot- 
ton spinning  factories".  And  as  to  the  dura- 
tion of  the   work  Villerme   observes,   that  the 


23  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

/convicts  in  prisons  work  but  ten  hours,  the 
slaves  in  the  west  Indies  work  but  nine  hours, 
while  there  existed  in  France  after  its  Revolu- 
tion of  1789,  which  had  proclaimed  the  pompous 
Rights  of  Man  "factories  where  the  day  was 
sixteen  hours,  out  of  which  the  laborers  were 
allowed  only  an  hour  and  a  half  for  meals. "*j 

What  a  miserable  abortion  of  the  revolution- 
ary principles  of  the  bourgeoisie !  i^Vhat  woeful 
gifts  from  its  god  Progress !  The  philanthrop- 
ists hail  as  benefactors  of  humanity  those  who 
having  done  nothing  to  become  rich,  give  work 
to  the  poor.  Far  better  were  it  to  scatter  pesti- 
lence and  to  poisen  the  springs  than  to  erect  a 
capitalist  factory  in  the  midst  of  a  rural  popula- 
tion. Introduce  factory  work,  and  farewell  joy, 
health  and  liberty;  farewell  to  all  that  makes 
life  beautiful  and  worth  living. f 

And  the  economists  go  on   repeating  to  the 

*  L.  R.  Villermfi.  "Tableau  de  I'gtat  physique  et 
moral  des  ouvriers  dans  les  fabriques  de  coton,  de 
laine  et  de  soie  (1840).  It  is  not  because  Dollfup, 
Koechlin  and  other  Alsacian  manufacturers  were  re- 
publicans, patriots  and  protestant  philanthropists  that 
they  treated  their  laborers  in  this  way,  for  Blanqui, 
the  academician,  Reybaud,  the  prototype  of  Jerome 
Paturot,  and  Jules  Simon,  have  observed  the  same 
amenities  for  the  working  class  among  the  very 
catholic  and  monarchical  manufacturers  of  Lille  and 
Lyons.  These  are  capitalist  virtues  ■which  harmonize 
delightfuly  with  all  political  and  religious  convictions. 

tThe  Indians  of  the  warlike  tribes  of  Brazil  kill 
their  invalids  and  old  people;  they  show  their  affec- 
tion for  them  by  putting  an  end  to  a  life  which  is  no 
longer   enlivened   by   combats,   feasts   and  dances.    All 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  23 

laborers,  "Work,  to  increase  social  wealth",  and 
nevertheless  an  economist,  Destutt  de  Tracy, 
answers :  fit  is  in  poor  nations  that  people  are 
comfortable,  in  rich  nations  they  are  ordinarily 
poor^;  and  his  disciple  Cherbuliez  continues: 
"The  laborers  themselves  in  co-operating  toward 
the  accumulation  of  productive  capital  contri- 
bute to  the  event  which  sooner  or  later  must 
deprive  them  of  a  part  of  their  wages".  But 
deafened  and  stupified  by  their  own  bowlings, 
the  economists  answer:  ''Wbrk,  always  work,  to 
create  your  prosperity",  and  in  the  name  of 
Christian  meekness  a  priest  of  the  Anglican 
Church,  the  Rev.  Mr.  Townshend,  intones : 
Work,  work,  night  and  day.  By  working  you 
make  your  poverty  increase  and  your  poverty 
releases  us  from  imposing  work  upon  you  by 
force  of  law.  The  legal  imposition  of  work 
"gives  too  much  trouble,  requires  too  much 
violence  and  makes  too  much  noise.  Hunger, 
on  the  contrary,  is  not  only  a  pressure  which  is 
peaceful,  silent  and  incessant,  but  as  it  is  the 
most  natural  motive  for  work  and  industry,  it 


primitive  peoples  have  given  these  proofs  of  affectior? 
to  their  relatives:  the  Massagetae  of  the  Caspian  Sea 
(Herodotus),  as  well  as  the  Wens  of  Germany  and  the 
Celts  of  Gaul.  In  the  churches  of  Sweden  even  lately 
they  preserved  clubs  called  family  clubs  which  served 
to  deliver  parents  from  the  sorrows  of  old  age.  How 
degenerate  are  the  modern  proletarians  to  accept  with 
patience  the   terrible   miseries  of  factory  labor! 


;84  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

also  provokes  to  the  most  powerful  efforts." 
(Work,  work,  proletarians,  to  increase  social 
wealth  and  your  in'"vidual  poverty;  work,  work, 
in  order  that  becoming  poorer,  you  may  have 
more  reason  to  work  and  become  miserable. 
Such  is  the  inexorable  law  of  capitalist  produc- 
tion^ 

Because,  lending  ear  to  the  fallacious  words 
of  the  economists,  the  proletarians  have  given 
themselves  up  body  and  soul  to  the  vice  of  work, 
they  precipitate  the  whole  of  society  into  these 
industrial  crises  of  over-production  which  con- 
vulse the  social  organism.  Then  because  there 
is  a  plethora  of  merchandise  and  a  dearth  of  pur- 
chasers, the  shops  are  closed  and  hunger  scour- 
ges the  working  people  with  its  whip  of  a 
thousand  lashes.  The  proletarians,  brutalized  by 
the  dogma  of  work,  not  understanding  that  the 
over-work  which  they  have  inflicted  upon  them- 
selves during  the  time  of  pretended  prosperity 
is  the  cause  of  their  present  misery,  do  not  run 
to  the  granaries  of  wheat  and  cry :  "We  are 
hungry,  we  wish  to  eat.  True  we  have  not  a  red 
cent,  but  beggars  as  we  are,  it  is  we.  neverthe- 
less, who  harvested  the  wheat  and  gathered  the 
grapes."  They  do  not  besiege  the  warehouse 
of  Bonnet,  or  Jujurieux,  the  inventor  of  in- 
dustrial convents,  and   cry  out:     "M.   Bonnet, 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  35 

here  are  your  working  women,  silk  workers, 
spinners,  weavers;  they  are  shivering  pitifully 
under  their  patched  cotton  dresses,  yet  it  is 
they  who  have  spun  and  woven  the  silk  robes  of 
the  fashionable  women  of  all  Christendom.  The 
poor  creatures  working  thirteen  hours  a  day, 
had  no  time  to  think  of  their  toilet.  Now,  they 
are  out  of  work  and  have  J:ime  to  rustle  in  the 
silks  they  have  made.  (Ever  since  they  lost 
their  milk  teeth  they  have  devoted  themselves 
to  your  fortune  and  have  lived  in  abstinence?) 
Now  they  are  at  leisure  and  wish  to  enjoy  a 
little  of  the  fruits  of  their  labor.  Come,  M. 
Bonnet,  give  them  your  silks,  M.  Harmel  shall 
furnish  his  muslins,  M.  Pouyer-Quertier  his 
calicos,  M.  Pinet  his  boots  for  their  dear  little 
feet,  cold  and  damp.  Clad  from  top  to  toe  and 
gleeful,  they  will  be  delightful  to  look  at.  Come, 
no  evasions,  you  are  a  friend  of  humanity,  are 
you  not,  and  a  Christian  into  the  bargain?  Put 
at  the  disposal  of  your  working  girls  the  fortune 
they  have  built  up  for  you  out  of  their  flesh ;  you 
want  to  help  business,  get  your  goods  into  circu- 
lation,— here  are  consumers  ready  at  hand.  Give 
them  unlimited  credit.  You  are  simply  compel- 
led to  give  credit  to  merchants  whom  you  do 
not  know  from  Adam  or  Eve,  who  have  given 
you  nothing,  not  even  a  glass  of  water.     Your 


26  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

working  women  will  pay  the  debt  the  best  they 
can.  If  at  maturity  they  let  their  notes  go  to 
protest,  and  if  they  have  nothing  to  attach,  you 
can  demand  that  they  pay  you  in  prayers.  They 
will  send  you  to  paradise  better  than  your  black- 
gowned  priests  steeped  in  tobacco." 

Instead  of  taking  advantage  of  periods  of 
crisis,  for  a  general  distribution  of  their  products 
and  a  universal  holiday,  the  laborers,  perishing 
with  hunger,  go  and  beat  their  heads  against 
the  doors  of  the  workshops.  W^th  pale  faces, 
emaciated  bodies,  pitiful  speeches  they  assail  the 
manufacturers :  "Good  M,  Chagot,  sweet  M. 
Schneider,  give  us  work,  it  is  not  hunger,  but 
the  passion  for  work  which  torments  us".  And 
these  wretches,  who  have  scarcely  the  strength 
to  stand  upright,  sell  twelve  and  fourteen  hours 
of  work  twice  as  cheap  as  when  they  had  bread 
on  the  table.  And  the  philanthropists  of  indus- 
try profit  by  their  lockouts  to  manufacture  at 
lower  cost. 

If  industrial  crises  follow  periods  of  over- 
work as  inevitably  as  night  follows  day,  bring- 
ing after  them  lockouts  and  poverty  without  end, 
they  also  lead  to  inevitable  bankruptcy.  So 
long  as  the  manufacturer  has  credit  he  gives 
free  rein  to  the  rage  for  work.  He  borrows, 
and  borrows  again,  to  furnish  raw  material  to 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  27 

his  laborers,  and  goes  on  producing  without 
considering  that  the  market  is  becoming  satiated 
and  that  if  his  goods  don't  happen  to  be  sold, 
his  notes  will  still  come  due.  At  his  wits'  end, 
he  implores  the  banker,  he  throws  himself  at 
his  feet,  offering  his  blood,  his  honor.  "A  little 
gold  will  do  my  business  better",  answers  the 
Rothschild.  "You  have  20,000  pairs  of  hose 
in  your  warehouse ;  they  are  worth  20c.  I  will 
take  them  at  4c."  The  banker  gets  possession 
of  the  goods  and  sells  them  at  6c  or  8c,  and 
pockets  certain  frisky  dollars  which  owe  nothing 
to  anybody :  but  the  manufacturer  has  stepped 
back  for  a  better  leap.  At  last  the  crash  comes 
and  the  warehouses  disgorge.  Then  so  much 
merchandise  is  thrown  out  of  the  window  that 
you  cannot  imagine  how  it  came  in  by  the  door. 
Hundreds  of  millions  are  required  to  figure  the 
value  of  the  goods  that  are  destroyed.  In  the 
last  century  they  were  burned  or  thrown  into 
the  water.* 

But  before  reaching  this  decision,  the  manu- 
facturers travel  the  world  over  in  search  of 
markets  for  the  goods  which  are  heaping  up. 
They  force  their  government  to  annex  Congo, 


•  At  the  Industrial  Congress  held  in  Berlin  in  Jan. 
21,  ■'S79,  the  losses  in  the  iron  industry  of  Germany 
durini^  the  last  crisis  were  estimated  at  $109,056,000^ 


28  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

to  seize  on  Tonquin,  to  batter  down  the  Chinese 
Wall  with  cannon  shots  to  make  an  outlet  for 
their  cotton  goods.  In  previous  centuries  it  was 
a  duel  to  the  death  between  France  and  Eng- 
land as  to  which  should  have  the  exclusive  pri- 
vilege of  selling  to  America  and  the  Indies. 
Thousands  of  young  and  vigorous  men  reddened 
the  seas  with  their  blood  during  the  colonial 
wars  of  the  sixteenth,  seventeenth  and  eight- 
eenth centuries. 

(There  is  a  surplus  of  capital  as  well  as  of 
g^oods.  The  financiers  no  longer  know  where 
to  place  it.  Then  they  go  among  the  happy 
nations  who  are  loafing  in  the  sun  smoking 
cigarettes  and  they  lay  down  railroads,  erect 
factories  and  import  the  curse  of  work.  And 
this  exportation  of  French  capital  ends  one  fine 
morning  in  diplomatic  complications.  In  Egypt, 
for  example,  France,  England  and  Germany 
were  on  the  point  of  hairpulling  to  decide  which 
usurers  shall  be  paid  first.  Or  it  ends  with  wars 
'ike  that  in  Mexico  where  French  soldiers  are 
sent  to  play  the  part  of  constables  to  collect  bad 
debts.* 


*  M.  Clemenceau's  "Justice"  sa!d  on  April  6,  1880, 
In  Its  financial  department:  "We  have  heard  this  opin- 
ion maintained,  that  even  without  pressure  the  bil- 
lions of  the  war  jf  1870  would  have  been  equally  lost 
for  France,  that  is  under  the  form  of  loans  periodic* 
ally  put  out  to  balance  the  budgets  of  foreign  coun« 


c 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  39 

These  individual  and  social  miseries,  however 
great  and  innumerable  they  may  be,  however 
eternal  they  appear,  will  vanish  like  hyenas  and 
jackals  at  the  approach  of  the  lion,  when  the 
proletariat  shall  say  "I  will".  ('But  to  arrive  at 
the  realization  of  its  strength  the  proletariat  must 
trample  under  foot  the  prejudices  of  Christian 
ethics,  economic  ethics  and  free-thought  ethics'j 
It  must  return  to  its  natural  instincts,  it  must 


proclaim  the  Rights  of  Laziness,  a  thousand 
times  more  noble  and  more  sacred  than  the 
anaemic  Rights  of  Man  concocted  by  the  meta- 
physical lawyers  of  the  bourgeois  revolutions 
It  must  accustom  itself  to  working  but  three 
hours  a  day,  reserving  the  rest  of  the  day  and 
night  for  leisure  and  feasting. 

Thus  far  my  task  has  been  easy;  I  have  had 
but  to  describe  real  evils  well  known,  alas,  by 
all  of  us;  but  to  convince  the  proletariat  that 
the  ethics  innoculated  into  it  is  wicked,  that  the 
unbridled  work  to  which  it  has  given  itself  up 
for  the  last  hundred  years  is  the  most  terrible 


tries;  this  is  also  our  opinion."  The  loss  of  English 
capital  on  loans  of  South  American  Republics  is  esti- 
mated at  a  billion  dollars.  The  French  laborers  not 
only  produced  the  billion  dollars  paid  Bismarck,  but 
they  continued  to  pay  interest  on  the  war  indemnity 
to  Ollivier,  Girardin,  Bazaine  and  other  income  draw- 
ers, who  brought  on  the  war  and  the  rout.  Neverthe- 
less they  still  have  one  shred  of  consolation;  theso 
billions  will  not  bring  on  a  war  of  renrisaL 


80  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

scourge  that  has  ever  struck  humanity,  that  work 
will  become  a  mere  condiment  to  the  pleasures 
of  idleness,  a  beneficial  exercise  to  the  human 
organism,  a  passion  useful  to  the  social  organ- 
ism only  when  wisely  regulated  and  limited  to 
a  maximum  of  three  hours  a  day ;  this  is  an 
arduous  task  beyond  my  strength.  Only  com- 
munist physiologists,  hygienists  and  economists 
could  undertake  it.  In  the  following  pages  I 
shall  merely  try  to  show  that  (given  the  modern 
means  of  production  and  their  unlimited  repro- 
djic^tive  power  it  is  necessary  to  curb  the^x- 
travagant  passion  of  the  laborers  for  work  and 
to  oblige  them  to  consume  the  goods  which  they 
produce.; 

III. 

THE    CONSEQUENCES    OF   OVER-PRODUCTION. 

A  Greek  poet  of  Cicero's  time,  Antiparos,  thus 
sang  of  the  invention  of  the  water-mill  (for 
grinding  grain),  which  was  to  free  the  slave 
women  and  bring  back  the  Golden  Age :  "Spare 
the  arm  which  turns  the  mill,  O,  millers,  and 
sleep  peacefully.  Let  the  cock  warn  you  in  vain 
that  day  is  breaking.  Demeter  has  imposed  up- 
on the  nymphs  the  labor  of  the  slaves,  and  be- 
hold them  leaping  merrily  over  the  wheel,  and 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  81 

behold  the  axle  tree,  shaken,  turning  with  its 
spokes  and  making  the  heavy  rolling  stone  rev- 
olve. Let  us  live  the  life  of  our  fathers,  and 
let  us  rejoice  in  idleness  over  the  gifts  that  the 
goddess  grants  us."  Alas !,  the  leisure  which  the 
pagan  poet  announced  has  not  come,  rihe  blind, 
perverse  and  murderous  passion  for  work  trans- 
forms the  liberating  machine  into  an  instrument 
for  the  enslavement  of  free  men.  Its  product- 
iveness impoverishes' them.        ^ 

A  good  workingwoman  makes  with  her  need- 
les only  five  meshes  a  minute,  while  certain 
circular  knitting  machines  make  30,000  in  the 
same  time.  Every  minute  of  the  machine  is 
thus  equivalent  to  a  hundred  hours  of  the  work- 
ingwomen's  labor,  or  again,  every  minute  of  the 
machine's  labor,  gives  the  workingwomen  ten 
days  of  rest.  What  is  true  for  the  knitting  in- 
dustry is  more  or  less  true  for  all  industries 
reconstructed  by  modern  machinery.  But  what 
do  we  see?  fin  proportion  as  the  machine  is 
improved  and  performs  man's  work  with  an  ever 
increasing  rapidity  and  exactness,  the  laborer, 
instead  of  prolonging  his  former  rest  (times, 
redoubjes  his  ardor,  as  if  he  wished  to  rival  the 
machine.  O,  absurd  and  murderous  competi- 
tion! . 

That  the  competition  of  man  and  the  machine 


32  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

might  have  free  course,  the  proletarians  have 
aboHshed  wise  laws  which  limited  the  labor  of 
the  artisans  of  the  ancient  guilds;  they  have 
suppressed  the  holidays.*  Because  the  ^oduc- 
ers  of  that  time  worked  but  five  days  out  of 
seven,  are  we  to  believe  the  stories  told  by  lying 
economists,  that  they  lived  on  nothing  but  air 
and  fresh  water?  Not  so,/they  had  leisure  to 
taste  the  joys  of  earth,  to  make  love  and  to 
frolic,  to  banquet  joyously  in  honor  of  the  jovial 
god  of  idleness!.  Gloomy  England,  immersed 
in  protestantisrri;  was  then  called  "Merrie  Eng- 


•  Under  the  old  regime,  the  laws  of  the  church  guar- 
anteed the  laborer  ninety  rest  days,  fifty-two  Sundays 
and  thirty-eight  holidays,  during  which  he  was  strict- 
ly forbidden  to  work.  This  was  the  great  crime  of 
catliolicism,  the  principal  cause  of  the  irreligion  of 
the  industrial  and  commercial  bourgeoisie:  under  the 
revolution,  when  once  it  w^as  in  the  saddle,  it  abo- 
lished the  holidays  and  replaced  the  week  of  seven 
days  by  that  of  ten,  in  order  that  the  people  might 
no  longer  have  more  than  one  rest  day  out  of  the 
ten.  It  emancipated  the  laborers  from  the  yoke  of 
the  church  in  order  the  better  to  subjugate  them  un- 
der the  yoke  of  work. 

The  hatred  against  the  holidays  does  not  appear 
until  the  modern  industrial  and  commercial  bour- 
geoisie takes  definite  form,  between  the  fifteenth  and 
sixteenth  centuries.  Henry  IV  asked  of  the  pope  that 
they  be  reduced.  He  refused  because  "one  of  the  cur- 
rent heresies  of  the  day  is  regarding  feasts"  (Letters 
of  Cardinal  d'Ossat).  But  in  1666  Pereflxus,  archbishop 
of  Paris,  suppressed  seventeen  of  them  in  his  diocese. 
Protestantism,  which  was  the  Christian  religion  adapt- 
ed to  the  new  industrial  and  commercial  needs  of  the 
bourgeoisie,  was  less  solicitous  for  the  people's  rest. 
It  dethroned  the  saints  in  heaven  in  order  to  abolish 
their   feast   days  on   earth. 

Religious  reform  and  philosophical  free  thought 
were  but  pretexts  which  permitted  the  Jesuitical  and 
rapacious  bourgeoisie  to  pilfer  the  feast  days  of  the 
people.  , 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  33 

'and."  Rabelais,  Quevedo,  Cervantes,  and  the 
unknown  authors  of  the  romances  make 
our  mouths  water  with  their  pictures  of  those 
monumental  feasts*  with  which  the  men  of  that 
time  regaled  themselves  between  two  battles  and 
two  devastations,  in  which  everything  "went  by 
the  barrel".  Jordaens  and  the  Flemish  School 
have  told  the  story  of  these  feasts  in  their  de- 
lightful pictures.  Where,  O,  where,  are  the 
sublime  gargantuan  stomachs  of  those  days ; 
where  are  the  sublime  brains  encircling  all  human 
thought?  We  have  indeed  grown  puny  and  de- 
generate. Embalmed  beef,  potatoes,  doctored 
wine  and  Prussian  schnaps,  judiciously  com- 
bined with  compulsory  labor  have  weakened  our 
bodies  and  narrowed  our  minds.  And  the  times 
when  man  cramps  his  stomach  and  the  machine 
enlarges  its  out-put  are  the  very  times  when  the 
economists  preach  to  us  the  Malthusian  theory, 

♦  These  g-igantic  feasts  lasted  for  weeks.  Don  Ro- 
drigo  de  Lara  wins  his  bride  by  expeUing  the  Moors 
from  old  Calatrava,  and  the  Romancero  relates  the 
story: 

Les  bodas  fueron  en  Burgos 
Las  tornabodas  en  Salas: 
En  bodas  y  tornabodas 
Pasaron  slete  semanas 
Tantas  vienen  de  las  g-entes 
Que  no  caben  pnr  las  plazas 
(The  wedding  was  at  Bourges.  the  infaring  at  Salas. 
In   tlie   wedding   and   the    infaring   seven   weeks    were 
spent.     So  many  people  came  that  the  town  could  not 

hold  them ). 

The  men  of  these  seven-weeks  weddings  were  the 
heroic   soldiers  of  the   wars  of   independence. 


84  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

the  religion  of  abstinence  and  the  dogma  of 
work.  Really  it  would  be  better  to  pluck  out 
such  tongues  and  throw  them  to  the  dogs. 

Because  the  working  class,  with  its  simple 
good  faith,  has  allowed  itself  to  be  thus  indoc- 
trinated, because  with  its  native  impetuosity  it 
has  blindly  hurled  itself  into  work  and  abstin- 
ence, (the  capitalist  class  has  found  itself  con- 
demned to  laziness  and  forced  enjoyment,  to 
unproductiveness  and  overconsumption^  But  if 
the  over-work  of  the  laborer  bruises  his  flesh 
and  tortures  his  nerves,  it  is  also  fertile  in  griefs 
for  the  capitalist. 

[The  abstinence  to  which  the  productive  class 
condemns  itself  obliges  the  capitalists  to  devote 
themselves  to  the  over-consumption  of  the  pro- 
ducts turned  out  so  riotously  by  the  laborers^ 
At  the  beginning  of  capitalist  production  a  cent- 
ury or  two  ago,  the  capitalist  was  a  steady  man 
of  reasonable  and  peaceable  habits.  He  con- 
tented himself  with  one  wife  or  thereabouts.  He 
drank  only  when  he  was  thirsty  and  ate  only 
when  he  was  hungry.  He  left  to  the  lords  and 
ladies  of  the  court  the  noble  virtues  of  debauch- 
ery. Today  every  son  of  the  newly  rich  makes 
it  incumbent  upon  himself  to  cultivate  the  dise- 
ase for  which  quicksilver  is  a  specific  in  order 
to  justify  the  labors  imposed  upon  the  workmen 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  35 

in  quicksilver  mines ;  every  capitalist  crams  him- 
self with  capons  stuffed  vi^ith  truffles  and  with 
the  choicest  brands  of  "^ne  in  order  to  encour- 
age the  breeders  of  blooded  poultry  and  the 
growers  of  Bordelais.  In  this  occupation  the 
o^rganism  rapidly  becomes  shattered,  the  hair 
falls  out,  the  gums  shrink  away  from  the  teeth, 
the  body  becomes  deformed,  the  stomach  ob- 
trudes abnormally,  respiration  becomes  difficult, 
the  motions  become  labored,  the  joints  become 
stiff,  the  fingers  knotted.  Others,  too  feeble  in 
body  to  endure  the  fatigues  of  debauchery,  but 
endowed  with  the  bump  of  philanthropic  dis- 
crimination, dry  up  their  brains  over  political 
economy,  or  juridical  philosophy  in  elaborating 
thick  soporific  books  to  employ  the  leisure  hours 
of  compositors  and  pressmen.  The  women  of 
fashion  live  a  life  of  martyrdom,  in  trying  on 
and  showing  off  the  fairy-like  toilets  which  the 
seamstresses  die  in  making.  They  shift  like  shut- 
tles from  morning  until  night  from  one  gown  into 
another.  For  hours  together  they  give  up  their 
hollow  heads  to  the  a/tists  in  hair,  who  at  any 
cost  insist  on  assuaging  their  passion  for  the 
construction  of  false  chignons.  Bound  in  their 
corsets,  pinched  in  their  boots,  decollette  to 
make  a  coal-miner  blush,  they  whirl  around  the 
whole  night  through  at  their  charity  balls  in 


36  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

order  to  pick  up  a  few  cents  for  poor  people,— 
sanctified  souls! 

To  fulfill  his  double  social  function  of  non- 
producer  and  over-consumer,  the  capitalist  was 
not  only  obliged  to  violate  his  modest  taste,  to 
lose  his  laborious  habits  of  two  centuries  ago  and 
to  give  himself  up  to  unbounded  luxury,  spicy 
indigestibles  and  syphilitic  debauches,  but  also  to 
withdraw  from  productive  labor  an  enormous 
mass  of  men  in  order  to  enlist  them  as  his  as- 
sistantSo 

Here  are  a  few  figures  to  prove  how  colossal 
is  this  waste  of  productive  forces.  According 
to  the  census  of  1861,  the  population  of  Eng- 
land and  Wales  comprised  20,066,244  persons, 
9,776,259  male  and  10,289,965  female.  If  we 
deduct  those  too  old  or  too  young  to  work,  the 
unproductive  women,  boys  and  girls,  then  the 
"ideological  professions",  such  as  governors, 
policemen,  clergy,  magistrates,  soldiers,  prosti- 
tutes, artists,  scientists,  etc.»  next  the  people 
exclusively  occupied  with  eating  the  labor  of 
others  under  the  form  of  land-rent,  interest, 
dividends,  etc.... there  remains  a  total  of  eight 
million  individuals  of  both  sexes  and  of  every 
age,  including  the  capitalists  who  function  in 
production,  commerce,  finance,  etc.  Out  of 
these  eight  millions  the  figures  run: 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  37 

Agricultural  laborers,  including  herdsmen,  serv- 
ants and  farmers'  daughters  living  at 

home    1,098,261 

Factory  Workers  in  cotton,  wool,  hemp, 

linen   silk,   knitting 642,607 

Mine  Workers   565,835 

Metal  Workers  (blast  furnaces,  rolling 

mills,  etc.)    396,998 

Domestics    1,208,648 

''If  we  add  together  the  textile  workers  and 
the  miners,  we  obtain  the  figures  of  1,208,442; 
if  to  the  former  we  add  the  metal  workers,  we 
have  a  total  of  1,039,605  persons;  that  is  to 
say,  in  each  case  a  number  below  that  of  the 
modern  domestic  slaves.  Behold  the  magnificent 
result  of  the  capitalist  exploitation  of  machines."* 
(To  this  class  of  domestics,  the  size  of  which 
indicates  the  stage  attained  by  capitalist  civiliza- 
tion, must  still  be  added  the  enormous  class  of 
unfortunates  devoted  exclusively  to  satisfying 
the  vain  and  expensive  tastes  of  the  rich  clas- 
ses :  diamond  cutters,  lace-makers,  embroider- 
ers, binders  of  luxurious  books,  seamstresses  em- 
ployed on  expensive  gowns  decorators  of  villas, 
etc.Q 

•  Karl  Marx's  ♦•Capital". 

t  "The  proportion  In  which  the  population  of  th« 
country  is  employed  as  domestics  in  the  service  of  the 
wealthy  class  indicates  Its  progress  in  national  wealth 


38  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

Once  settled  down  into  absolute  laziness  and 
demoralized  by  enforced  enjoyment,  the  capital- 
ist class  in  spite  of  the  injury  involved  in  its  new 
kind  of  life,  adapted  itself  to  it.  Soon  it  began 
to  look  upon  any  change  with  horror.  The 
sight  of  the  miserable  conditions  of  life  resign- 
edly accepted  by  the  working  class  and  the  sight 
of  the  organic  degradation  engendered  by  the 
depraved  passion  for  work  increased  its  aversion 
for  all  compulsory  labor  and  all  restrictions  of 
its  pleasures.  It  is  precisely  at  that  time  that, 
without  taking  into  account  the  demoralization 
which  the  capitalist  class  had  imposed  upon  it- 
self as  a  social  duty,  the  proletarians  took  it 
into  their  heads  to  inflict  work  on  the  capital- 
ists Artless  as  they  were,  they  took  seriously 
the  theories  of  work  proclaimed  by  the  econom- 
ists and  moralists,  and  girded  up  their  loins  to 
inflict  the  practice  of  these  theories  upon  the 
capitalists.  The  proletariat  hoisted  the  banner, 
"He  who  will  not  work  Neither  shall  he  Eat". 
Lyons  in  1831  rose  up  for  bullets  or  work.  The 
federated   laborers   of   March    1871   called  their 


and  civilization."  (R.  M.  Martin,  "Ireland  Before  and 
After  the  Union,"  1818).  Gambetta,  who  has  denied 
that  there  was  a  social  question  ever  since  he  ceased 
to  be  the  poverty  stricken  lawyer  of  the  Caf6  Procope. 
undoubtedly  alluded  to  this  ever-increasing  domestic 
class  when  he  announced  the  advent  of  new  social 
Strata. 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  39 

uprising  'The  Revolution  of  Work".  To  these 
outbreaks  of  barbarous  fury  destructive  of  all 
capitalist  joy  and  laziness,  the  capitalists  had  no 
other  answer  than  ferocious  repression,  but  they 
know  that  if  they  have  been  able  to  repress  these 
revolutionary  explosions,  they  have  not  drowned 
in  the  blood  of  these  gigantic  massacres  the  ab- 
surd idea  of  the  proletariat  wishing  to  inflict 
work  upon  the  idle  and  reputable  classes,  and 
it  is  to  avert  this  misfortune  that  they  surround 
themselves  with  guards,  policemen,  magistrates 
and  jailors,  supported  in  laborious  unprodutive- 
ness.  There  is  no  more  room  for  illusion  as  to 
the  function  of  modern  armies.  They  are  perm- 
anently maintained  only  to  suppress  the  "enemy 
within".  Thus  the  forts  of  Paris  and  Lyons 
have  not  been  built  to  defend  the  city  against 
the  foreigner,  but  to  crush  it  in  case  of  revolt. 
And  if  an  unanswerable  example  be  called  for, 
we  mention  the  army  of  Belgium,  that  paradise 
of  capitalism.  Its  neutrality  is  guaranteed  by 
the  European  powers,  and  nevertheless  its  army 
is  one  of  the  strongest  in  proportion  to  its  popula- 
tion. The  glorious  battlefields  of  the  brave  Belg- 
ian army  are  the  plains  of  the  Borinage  and  of 
Charleroi.  It  is  in  the  blood  of  the  unarmed 
miners  and  laborers  that  the  Belgian  officers 
temper  their  swords  and  win  their  epaulets.   The 


40  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

nations  of  Europe  have  not  national  armies  but 
mercenary  armies.  They  protect  the  capitalists 
against  the  popular  fury  which  would  condemn 
them  to  ten  hours  of  mining  or  spinning.  Again, 
I  while  compressing  its  own  stomach  the  working 
class  has  developed  abnormally  the  stomach  of 
the  capitalist  class,  condemned  to  over-consump- 
tion.; 

For  alleviation  of  its  painful  labor  the  capi- 
talist class  has  withdrawn  from  the  working  class 
a  mass  of  men  far  superior  to  those  still  devoted 
to  useful  production  and  has  condemned  them  in 
their  turn  to  unproductiveness  and  over-con- 
sumption. But  this  troop  of  useless  mouths  in 
spite  of  its  insatiable  voracity,  does  not  suffice 
to  consume  all  the  goods  which  the  laborers, 
brutalized  by  the  dogma  of  work,  produce  like 
madmen,  without  wishing  to  consume  them  and 
without  even  thinking  whether  people  will  be 
found  to  consume  them. 

(Confronted  with  this  double  madness  of  the 
jaborers  killing  themselves  with  over-produc- 
tion and  vegetating  in  abstinence,  the  great 
problem  of  capitalist  production  is  no  longer  to 
find  producers  and  to  multiply  their  powers  but 
to  discover  consumers,  to  excite  their  appetites 
and  create  in  them  fictitious  needs)  Since  the 
European    laBorers,    sTiive'ring    with    cold    and 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  41 

hunger,  refuse  to  wear  the  stuffs  they  weave,  to 
drink  the  wines  from  the  vineyards  they  tend, 
the  poor  manufacturers  in  their  goodness  of 
heart  must  run  to  the  ends  of  the  earth  to  find 
people  to  wear  the  clothes  and  drink  the  wines : 
Europe  exports  every  year  goods  amounting  to 
billions  of  dollars  to  the  four  corners  of  the 
earth,  to  nations  that  have  no  need  of  them.* 
But  the  explored  continents  are  no  longer  vast 
enough.  Virgin  countries  are  needed.  European 
manufacturers  dream  night  and  day  of  Africa, 
of  a  lake  in  the  Saharan  desert,  of  a  railroad  to 
the  Soudan.  They  anxiously  follow  the  prog- 
ress of  Livingston,  Stanley,  Du  Chaillu ;  they 
listen  open-mouthed  to  the  marvelous  tales  of 
these  brave  travelers.  What  unknown  wonders 
are  contained  in  the  "dark  continent"!  Fields 
are  sown  with  elephants'  teeth,  rivers  of  cocoa- 
nut  oil  are  dotted  with  gold,  millions  of  backsides, 
as  bare  as  the  faces  of  Dufaure  and  Girardin, 
are  awaiting  cotton  goods  to  teach  them  dec- 


♦  Two  examples:  The  English  government  to  satisfy 
the  peasants  of  India,  who  in  spite  of  the  periodical 
famines  desolating  their  country  insist  on  cultivating 
poppies  instead  of  rice  or  wheat,  has  been  obliged 
to  undertake  bloody  wars  in  order  to  impose  upon  the 
Chinese  Government  tlie  free  entry  of  Indian  opium. 
The  savages  of  Polj^nesia,  in  spite  of  the  mortality 
resulting  from  it  are  obliged  to  clothe  themselves 
In  the  English  fashion  in  order  to  consume  the  prod- 
ucts of  the  Scotch  distilleries  and  the  Manchester  cot- 
ton  mills. 


4!4  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

ency,  and  bottles  of  schnaps  and  bibles  from 
which  they  may  learn  the  virtues  of  civilization. 

But  all  to  no  purpose :  the  over-fed  capitalist, 
the  servant  class  greater  in  numbers  than  the 
productive  class,  the  foreign  and  barbarous  na- 
tions, gorged  with  European  goods ;  nothing, 
nothing  can  melt  away  the  mountains  of  products 
heaped  up  higher  and  more  enormous  than  the 
pyramids  of  Egypt.  The  productiveness  of 
European  laborers  defies  all  consumption,  all 
waste. 

The  manufacturers  have  lost  their  bearings 
and  know  not  which  way  to  turn.  They  can  no 
longer  find  the  raw  material  to  satisfy  the  law- 
less depraved  passion  of  their  laborers  for  work. 
In  our  woolen  districts  dirty  and  half  rotten 
rags  are  raveled  out  to  use  in  making  certain 
cloths  sold  under  the  name  of  renaissance,  which 
have  about  the  same  durability  as  the  promises 
made  to  voters.  At  Lyons,  instead  of  leaving 
the  silk  fiber  in  its  natural  simplicity  and  supp- 
leness, it  is  loaded  down  with  mineral  salts,  which 
while  increasing  its  weight,  make  it  friable  and 
far  from  durable.  (All  our  products  are  adulter- 
ated to  aid  in  their  sale  and  shorten  their  life. 
Our  epoch  will  be  called  the  "Age  of  adultera- 
tion" just  as  the  first  epochs  of  humanity  re- 
ceived the  names  of  "The  Age  of  Stone  "A  "The 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  43 

Age  of  Bronze",  from  the  character  of  their 
production.  Certain  ignorant  people  accuse  our 
pious  manufacturers  of  fraud,  while  in  reality 
the  thought  which  animates  them  is  to  furnish 
work  to  their  laborers,  who  cannot  resign  them- 
selves to  living  with  their  arms  folded.  These 
adulterations,  whose  sole  motive  is  a  humanitar- 
ian sentiment,  but  which  bring  splendid  profits 
to  the  manufacturers  who  practice  them,  if  they 
are  disastrous  for  the  quality  of  the  goods,  if 
they  are  an  inexhaustible  source  of  waste  in 
human  labor,  nevertheless  prove  the  ingenuous 
philanthropy  of  the  capitalists,  and  the  horrible 
perversion  of  the  laborers,  who  to  gratify  their 
vice  for  work  oblige  the  manufacturers  to  stifle 
the  cries  of  their  conscience  and  to  violate  even 
the  laws  of  commercial  honesty. 

And  nevertheless,  in  spite  of  the  overproduc- 
tion of  goods,  in  spite  of  the  adulterations  in 
manufacturing,  the  laborers  encumber  the  market 
in  countless  numbers  imploring :  Work !  Work ! 
Their  superabundance  ought  to  compel  them  to 
bridle  their  passion ;  on  the  contrary  it  carries 
it  to  the  point  of  paroxysm.  Let  a  chance  for 
work  present  itself,  thither  they  rush;  then  they 
demand  twelve,  fourteen  hours  to  glut  their 
appetite  for  work,  and  the  next  day  they  are 
again  thrown  out  on  the  pavement  with  no  more 


44  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

food  for  '"heii  vice.  Every  year  in  all  industries 
lockoiHs  occur  with  the  regularity  of  the  sea- 
sons. Over-work,  destructive  of  the  organism, 
is  succeeded  by  absolute  rest  during  two  or  four 
months,  and  when  work  ceases  the  pittance  cea- 
ses. {Since  the  vice  of  work  is  diabolically  at- 
tached to  the  heart  of  the  laborers,  since  its 
requirements  stifle  all  the  other  instincts  of  na- 
ture, since  the  quantity  of  work  required  by 
society  is  necessarily  limited  by  consumption  and 
by  the  supply  of  raw  materials,  why  devour  in 
six  months  the  work  of  a  whole  year;  why  not 
distribute  it  uniformly  over  the  twelve  months 
and  force  every  workingman  to  content  himself 
with  six  or  five  hours  a  day  throughout  the  year 
instead  of  getting  indigestion  from  twelve  hours 
during  six  months  ?  Y  Once  assured  of  their  daily 
portion  of  work,  the  laborers  will  no  longer  be 
jealous  of  each  other,  no  longer  fight  to  snatch 
away  work  from  each  other's  hands  and  bread 
from  each  other's  mouths,  and  then,  not  ex- 
hausted in  body  and  mind,  they  will  begin  to 
practice  the  virtues  of  laziness. 

Brutalized  by  their  vice,  the  laborers  have 
been  unable  to  rise  to  the  conception  of  this  fact, 
that  to  have  work  for  all  it  is  necessary  to  appor- 
tion it  like  water  on  a  ship  in  distress.  Mean- 
while certain  manufacturers  in  the  name  of  cap- 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  45 

italist  exploitation  have  for  a  long  time  de- 
manded a  legal  limitation  of  the  work  day.  Be- 
fore the  commission  of  i860  on  professional  edu- 
cation, one  of  the  greatest  manufacturers  of 
Alsace,  M.  Bourcart  of  Guebwiller,  declared : 
"The  day  of  twelve  hours  is  excessive  and  ought 
to  be  reduced  to  eleven,  while  work  ought  to  be 
stopped  at  two  o'clock  on  Saturday.  I  advise 
the  adoption  of  this  measure,  although  it  may 
appear  onerous  at  first  sight.  We  have  tried  it 
in  our  industrial  establishments  for  four  years 
and  find  ourselves  the  better  for  it,  while  the 
average  production,  far  from  having  diminished, 
has  increased."  In  his  study  of  machines  M.  F. 
Passy  quotes  the  following  letter  from  a  great 
Belgian  manufacturer  M.  Ottevaere :  "Our  ma- 
chines, although  the  same  as  those  of  the  English 
spinning  mills,  do  not  produce  what  they  ought 
to  produce  or  what  those  same  machines  would 
produce  in  England,  although  the  spinners  there 
work  two  hours  a  day  less.  We  all  work  two 
good  hours  too  much.  I  am  convinced  that  if 
we  worked  only  eleven  hours  instead  of  thirteen 
we  should  have  the  same  product  and  we  should 
consequently  produce  more  ecconomically.' 
Again,  M.  Leroy  Beaulieu  affirms  that  it  is  a 
remark  of  a  great  Belgian  manufacturer  that  the 


46  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

weeks  in  which  a  holiday  falls  result  in  a  prod- 
uct not  less  than  ordinary  weeks.* 

An  aristocratic  government  has  dared  to  do 
what  a  people,  duped  in  their  simplicity  by  the 
moralists,  never  dared.  Despising  the  lofty  and 
moral  industrial  considerations  of  the  economists, 
who  like  the  birds  of  ill  omen,  croaked  that  to 
reduce  by  one  hour  the  work  in  factories  was  to 
decree  the  ruin  of  English  industry,  the  govern- 
ment of  England  has  forbidden  by  a  law  strictly 
enforced  to  work  more  than  ten  hours  a  day, 
and  as  before  England  remains  the  first  industrial 
nation  of  the  world,  f 

The  experiment  tried  on  so  great  a  scale  is  on 
record ;  the  experience  of  certain  intelligent  cap- 
italists is  on  record.  They  prove  beyond  a  doubt 
that  to  strengthen  human  production  it  is  neces- 
sary to  reduce  the  hours  of  labor  and  multiply 
the  pay  days  and  feast  days,  yet  the  French  na- 
tion is  not  convinced.  But  if  the  miserable  re- 
duction of  two  hours  has  increased  English  pro- 
duction by  almost  one-third  in  ten  years,  what 
breathless  speed  would  be  given  to  French  pro- 


*  Paul  Leroy-Beaulieu.  La  Question  GuvriSre  au 
XIX  si&cle,   1872. 

t  It  should  be  observed  that  this  was  written  in 
1883,  since  which  time  the  United  States  has  taken  the 
first  rank.  The  soundness  of  Lafargue's  reasoning  is 
confirmed  by  the  fact  that  in  this  country  the  iioura 
of  labor  in  the  most  important  industries  are  even 
less  than  in  England.    (Translator.) 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  47 

duction  by  a  legal  limitation  of  the  working  day 
to  three  hours.  Cannot  the  laborers  understand 
that  by  over-working  themselves  they  exhaust 
their  own  strength  and  that  of  their  progeny, 
that  they  are  used  up  and  long  before  their  time 
come  to  be  incapable  of  any  work  at  all,  that  ab- 
sorbed and  brutalized  by  this  single  vice  they  are 
no  longer  men  but  pieces  of  men,  that  they  kill 
within  themselves  all  beautiful  faculties,  to  leave 
nothing  alive  and  flourishing  except  the  furious 
madness  for  workJ  Like  Arcadian  parrots,  they 
repeat  the  lesson  of  the  economist :  "Let  us  work, 
let  us  work  to  increase  the  national  wealth.'  O, 
idiots,  it  is  because  you  work  too  much  that  the 
industrial  equipment  develops  slowly.  Stop  bray- 
ing and  listen  to  an  economist,  no  other  than  M. 
L.  Reybaud,  whom  we  were  fortunate  enough  to 
lose  a  few  months  ago.  "It  is  in  general  bv  the 
conditions  of  hand-work  that  the  revolution  in 
methods  of  labor  is  regulated.  As  long  as  hand- 
work furnishes  its  services  at  a  low  price,  it  is 
lavished,  while  efforts  are  made  to  economize  it 
when  its  services  become  more  costly."  * 

(To  force  the  capitalists  to  improve  their  ma- 
chines of  wood  and  iron  it  is  necessary  to  raise 
wages  and  diminish  the  working  hours  of  the 


•  Louis     Reybaud.     Le     coton,    son    regime,    ses  oro- 
biemes   (1863). 


48  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

machines  of  flesh  and  blood  J  Do  you  ask  for 
proofs?  They  can  be  furnished  by  the  hundreds. 
In  spinning,  the  self-acting  mule  was  invented 
and  applied  at  Manchester  because  the  spinners 
refused  to  work  such  long  hours  as  before.  In 
America  the  machine  is  invading  all  branches  of 
farm  production,  from  the  making  of  butter  to 
the  weeding  of  wheat.  Why,  because  the  Ame- 
rican, free  and  lazy,  would  prefer  a  thousand 
deaths  to  the  bovine  life  of  the  French  peasant. 
Plowing,  so  painful  and  and  so  crippling  to  the 
laborer  in  our  glorious  France,  is  in  the  Ameri- 
can West  an  agreeable  open-air  pastime,  which 
he  practices  in  a  sitting  posture,  smoking  his 
pipe  nonchalantly. 

IV. 

NEW  SONGS  TO  NEW  MUSIC. 

We  have  seen  that  by  diminishing  the  hours 
of  labor  new  mechanical  forces  will  be  conquered 
for  social  production.  Furthermore,  by  obliging 
the  laborers  to  consume  their  products  the  army 
of  workers  will  be  immensely  increased.  The  cap- 
italist class  once  relieved  from  its  function  of  uni- 
versal consumer  will  hasten  to  dismiss  its  train 
of  soldiers,  magistrates,  journalists,  procurers, 
which  it  has  withdrawn  trom.  useful  labor  to  help 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  49 

it  in  consuming  and  wasting.  Then  the  labor 
market  will  overflow.  Then  will  be  required  an 
iron  law  to  put  a  limit  on  work.  It  will  be  im- 
possible to  find  employment  for  that  swarm  of 
former  unproductives,  more  numerous  than  in- 
sect parasites,  and  after  them  must  be  considered 
all  those  who  provide  for  their  needs  and  their 
vain  and  expensive  tastes.  When  there  are  no 
more  lackeys  and  generals  to  decorate,  no  more 
free  and  married  prostitutes  to  be  covered  with 
laces,  no  more  cannons  to  bore,  no  more  palaces 
to  build,  there  will  be  need  of  severe  laws  to  com- 
pel the  working  women  and  workingmen  who 
have  been  employed  on  embroidered  laces,  iron 
workings,  buildings,  to  take  the  hygienic  and 
calisthenic  exercises  requisite  to  re-establish  their 
health  and  improve  their  race.  When  once  we 
begin  to  consume  European  products  at  home 
instead  of  sending  them  to  the  devil,  it  will  be 
necessary  that  the  sailors,  dock  handlers  and  the 
draymen  sit  down  and  learn  to  twirl  their  thumbs. 
The  happy  Polynesians  may  then  love  as  they 
like  without  fearing  the  civilized  Venus  and  the 
sermons  of  European  moralists. 

And  that  is  not  all :  In  order  to  find  work  for 
all  the  non-producers  of  our  present  society,  in 
order  to  leave  room  for  the  industrial  equipment 
to  go   on   developing   indefinitely,   the   working 


60  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

class  will  be  compelled,  like  the  capitalist  class, 
to  ^o  violence  to  its  taste  for  abstinence  and  to 
develop  indefinitely  its  consuming  capacities; 
Instead  of  eating  an  ounce  or  two  of  gristly  meat 
once  a  day,  when  it  eats  any,  it  will  eat  juicy 
beefsteaks  of  a  pound  or  two ;  instead  of  drinking 
moderately  of  bad  wine,  it  will  become  more 
orthodox  than  the  pope  and  will  drink  broad  and 
deep  bumpers  of  Bordeaux  and  Burgundy  with- 
out commercial  baptism  and  will  leave  water  to 
the  beasts. 

The  proletarians  have  taken  into  their  heads 
to  inflict  upon  the  capitalists  ten  hours  of  forge 
and  factory ;  that  is  their  great  mistake,  because 
of  social  antagonisms  and  civil  wars.  Work 
ought  to  be  forbidden  and  not  imposed.  The 
Rothschilds  and  other  capitalists  should  be  al- 
lowed to  bring  testimony  to  the  fact  that  through- 
out their  whole  lives  they  have  been  perfect  vag- 
abonds, and  if  they  swear  they  wish  to  continue 
to  live  as  perfect  vagabonds  in  spite  of  the  gen- 
eral mania  for  work,  they  should  be  pensioned 
and  should  receive  every  morning  at  the  city  hall 
a  five-dollar  gold  piece  for  their  pocket  money. 
Social  discords  will  vanish.  Bond  holders  and 
capitalists  will  be  first  to  rally  to  the  popular 
party,  once  convinced  that  far  from  wishing  them 
harm,  its  purpose  is  rather  to  relieve  them  of 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  51 

the  labor  of  over-consumption  and  waste,  with 
which  they  have  been  overwhelmed  since  their 
birth.  As  for  the  capitalists  who  are  incapable 
of  proving  their  title  to  the  name  of  vagabond, 
they  will  be  allowed  to  follow  their  instincts. 
There  are  plenty  of  disgusting  occupations  in 
which  to  place  them,  Dufaure  might  be  set  at 
cleaning  public  closets,  Gallifet*  might  perform 
surgical  operations  on  diseased  horses  and  hogs. 
The  members  of  the  amnesty  commission  might 
be  sent  to  the  stock  yards  to  pick  out  the  oxen 
and  the  sheep  to  be  slaughtered.  The  senators 
might  play  the  part  of  undertakers  and  lackeys 
in  funeral  processions.  As  for  the  others,  occu- 
pations could  be  found  for  them  on  a  level  with 
their  intelligence.  Lorgeril  and  Broglie  could 
cork  champagne  bottles,  only  they  would  have 
to  be  muzzled  as  a  precaution  against  intoxica- 
tion. Ferry,  Freycinet  and  Tirard  might  destroy 
the  bugs  and  vermin  in  the  departments  of  state 
and  other  public  houses.  It  would,  however,  be 
necessary  to  put  the  public  funds  out  of  the  reach 
of  the  capitalists  out  of  due  regard  for  their  ac- 
quired habits. 

But  vengeance,  harsh  and  prolonged,  will  be 


•  Gallifet  was  the  general  who  was  directly  respon- 
sible for  the  massacre  of  thousande  of  French  work- 
Inemen    at  the  closing    days  of  the  Paris  Commune. 


6S  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

heaped  upon  the  moralists  who  have  perverted 
nature,  the  bigots,  the  canters,  the  hypocrites, 
"and  other  such  sects  of  men  who  disguise  them- 
selves like  maskers  to  deceive  the  world.  For 
whilst  they  give  the  common  people  to  under- 
stand that  they  are  busied  about  nothing  but  con- 
templation and  devotion  in  fastings  and  macera- 
tion of  their  sensuality, — and  that  only  to  sus- 
tain and  aliment  the  small  fraility  of  their  hu- 
manity,— it  is  so  far  otherwise  that  on  the  con- 
trary, God  knows,  what  cheer  they  make ;  et 
Curios  simulant,  sed  Bacchanalia  vivunt*  You 
may  read  it  in  gjeat  letters,  in  the  coloring  of 
their  red  snouts,  and  gulching  bellies  as  big  as  a 
tun,  unless  it  be  when  they  perfume  themselves 
with  sulphur."t  On  the  days  of  great  popular 
rejoicing,  when  instead  of  swallowing  dust  as  on 
the  15th  of  August  and  14th  of  July  under  cap- 
italism, the  communists  and  coUectivists  will  eat, 
drink  and  dance  to  their  hearts'  content,  the 
members  of  the  Academy,  of  moral  and  political 
sciences,  the  priests  with  long  robes  and  short, 
of  the  economic,  catholic,  protestant,  Jewish,  posi- 
tivist  and  free-thought  church ;  the  propagandists 
of  Malthusianism,  and  of  Christian,  altruistic, 
independent  or  dependent  ethics,  clothed  in  yel- 

*  They    simulate    Curius   but    live    like   Bacchanals. 
(Juvenal.) 

t  Rabelais  "Pantagruel."  Book  II.  Chapter  XXXIY, 
Translation  of  Urquhart  and  Motteux. 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  53 

k)w,  shall  be  compelled  to  hold  a  candle  until  it 
bums  their  fingers,  shall  starve  in  sight  of  tables 
loaded  with  meats,  fruits  and  flowers  and  shall 
agonize  with  thirst  in  sight  of  flowing  hogsheads. 
Four  times  a  year  with  the  changing  seasons 
they  shall  be  shut  up  like  the  knife  grinders'  dogs 
in  great  wheels  and  condemned  to  grind  wind 
for  ten  hours. 

The  lawyers  and  legislators  shall  suffer  the 
same  punishment.  Under  the  regime  of  idleness, 
to  kill  the  time,  which  kills  us  second  by  second, 
there  will  be  shows  and  theatrical  performances 
always  and  always.  And  here  we  have  the  very 
work  for  our  bourgeois  legislators.  We  shall  or- 
ganize them  into  traveling  companies  to  go  to 
the  fairs  and  villages,  giving  legislative  exhibi- 
tions. The  generals  in  riding  boots,  their  breasts 
brilliantly  decorated  with  medals  and  crosses, 
shall  go  through  the  streets  and  courts  levying 
recruits  among  the  good  people.  Gambetta  and 
his  comrade  Cassagnac  shall  tend  door.  Cas- 
sagnac,  in  full  duelist  costume,  rolling  his  eyes 
and  twisting  his  mustache,  spitting  out  burning 
tow,  shall  threaten  every  one  with  his  father's 
pistol*  and  sink  into  a  hole  as  soon  as  they  show 


*  Paul   de   Cassagnac,    like   his   father,   Granier,   was 
rominent  as  a  conservative  politician,  journalist  and 


prom 
duelist. 


54  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

him  LulHer's  portrait.  Gambetta  will  discourse 
on  foreign  politics  and  on  little  Greece,  who 
makes  a  doctor  of  him  and  would  set  Europe  on 
fire  to  pilfer  Turkey ;  on  great  Russia  that  stulti- 
fies him  with  the  mincemeat  she  promises  to  make 
of  Prussia  and  who  would  fain  see  mischief  brew- 
ing in  the  west  of  Europe  so  as  to  feather  her 
nest  in  the  east  and  to  strangle  nihilism  at  home ; 
on  Mr.  Bismark  who  was  good  enough  to  allow 

him  to  pronounce  himself  on  the  amnesty 

then  uncovering  his  mountainous  belly  smeared 
over  with  red  and  white  and  blue,  the  three  na- 
tional colors,  he  will  beat  the  tattoo  on  it,  and 
enumerate  the  delicate  little  ortolans,  the  truffles 
and  the  glasses  of  Margaux  and  Y'quem  that  it 
has  gulped  down  to  encourage  agriculture,  and 
to  keep  his  electors  of  Belleville  in  good  spirits. 

In  the  barracks  the  entertainment  will  open 
with  the  "Electoral  Farce." 

In  the  presence  of  the  voters  with  wooden 
heads  and  asses'  ears,  the  bourgeois  candidates, 
dressed  as  clowns,  will  dance  the  dance  of  poli- 
tical liberties,  wiping  themselves  fore  and  aft 
with  their  freely  promising  electoral  programs, 
and  talking  with  tears  in  their  eyes  of  the  mis- 
eries of  the  people  and  with  copper  in  their  voices 
of  the  glories  of  France.  Then  the  heads  of  the 
voters  will  bray  solidly  in  chorus,  hi  han !  hi  han! 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  55 

Then  will  start  the  great  play,  "The  Theft  of 
the  Nation's  Goods." 

Capitalist  France,  an  enormous  female,  hairy- 
faced  and  bald-headed,  fat,  flabby,  puffy  and  pale, 
with  sunken  eyes,  sleepy  and  yawning,  is  stretch- 
ing herself  out  on  a  velvet  couch.  At  her  feet 
Industrial  Capitalism,  a  gigantic  organism  of 
iron,  with  an  ape-like  mask,  is  mechanically  de- 
vouring men,  women  and  children,  whose  thrill- 
ing and  heart-rending  cries  fill  the  air ;  the  bank 
with  a  marten's  muzzle,  a  hyena's  body  and  harpy 
— hands,  is  nimbly  flipping  coins  out  of  his 
pocket.  Hordes  of  miserable,  emaciated  prole- 
tarians in  rags,  escorted  by  gendarmes  with 
drawn  sabers,  pursued  by  furies  lashing  them 
with  whips  of  hunger,  are  bringing  to  the  feet 
of  capitalist  France  heaps  of  merchandise,  casks 
of  wine,  sacks  of  gold  and  wheat.  Langlois,  his 
nether  garment  in  one  hand,  the  testament  of 
Proudhon  in  the  other  and  the  book  of  the  na- 
tional budget  between  his  teeth,  is  encamped  at 
the  head  of  the  defenders  of  national  property 
and  is  mounting  guard.  When  the  laborers, 
beaten  with  gun  stocks  and  pricked  with  bayo- 
nets, have  laid  down  their  burdens,  they  are 
driven  away  and  the  door  is  opened  to  the  man- 
ufacturers, merchants  and  bankers.  They  hurl 
themselves  pell  mell  upon  the  heap,    devouring 


56  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

cotton  goods,  sacks  of  wheat,  ingots  of  gold, 
emptying  casks  of  wine.  When  they  have  de- 
voured all  they  can,  they  sink  down,  filthy  and 
disgusting  objects  in  their  ordure  and  vomitings. 
Then  the  thunder  bursts  forth,  the  earth  shakes 
and  opens,  Historic  Destiny  arises,  with  her  iron 
foot  she  crushes  the  heads  of  the  capitalists,  hic- 
coughing, staggering,  falling,  unable  to  flee. 
With  her  broad  hand  she  overthrows  capitalist 
France,  astounded  and  sweating  with  fear. 

*     *     * 

(if,  uprooting  from  its  heart  the  vice  which 
dominates  it  and  degrades  its  nature,  the  work- 
ing class  were  to  arise  in  its  terrible  strength, 
not  to  demand  the  Rights  of  Man,  which  are  but 
the  rights  of  capitalist  exploitation,  not  to  de- 
mand the  Right  to  Work  which  is  but  the  right 
to  misery,  but  to  forge  a  brazen  law  forbidding 
any  man  to  work  more  than  three  hours  a  day, 
the  earth,  the  old  earth,  trembling  with  joy  would 
feel  a  new  universe  leaping  within  her  J  But  how 
should  we  ask  a  proletariat  corrupted  by  capital- 
ist ethics,  to  take  a  manly  resolution.... 

Like  Christ,  the  doleful  personification  of  an- 
cient slavery,  the  men,  the  women  and  the  chil- 
dren of  the  proletariat  have  been  climbing  pain- 
fully for  a  century  up  the  hard  Calvary  of  pain; 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  57 

for  a  century  compulsory  toil  has  broken  their 
bones,  bruised  their  flesh,  tortured  their  nerves; 
for  a  century  hunger  has  torn  their  entrails  and 
their  brains.  O  Laziness,  have  pity  on  our  long 
misery !  O  Laziness,  mother  of  the  arts  and  no- 
ble virtues,  be  thou  the  balm  of  human  anguish  I 

APPENDIX 

Our  moralists  are  very  modest  people.  If  they 
invented  the  dogma  of  work,  they  still  have 
doubts  of  its  efficacy  in  tranquilizing  the  soul, 
rejoicing  the  spirit,  and  maintaining  the  proper 
functioning  of  the  entrails  and  other  organs. 
They  wish  to  try  its  workings  on  the  populace, 
in  anima  vili,  before  turning  it  against  the  cap- 
italists, to  excuse  and  authorize  whose  vices  is 
their  peculiar  mission. 

But,  you,  three-for-a-cent  philosophers,  why 
thus  cudgel  your  brains  to  work  out  an  ethics 
the  practice  of  which  you  dare  not  counsel  to 
your  masters?  Your  dogma  of  work,  of  which 
you  are  so  proud,  do  you  wish  to  see  it  scoffed 
at,  dishonored?  Let  us  open  the  history  of  an- 
cient peoples  and  the  writings  of  their  philoso- 
phers and  law  givers.  "I  could  not  affirm,"  says 
the  father  of  history,  Herodotus,  "whether  the 
Greeks  derived  from  the  Egyptians  the  contempt 


58  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

which  they  have  for  work,  because  I  find  the 
same  contempt  established  among  the  Thracians, 
the  Cythians,  the  Persians,  the  Lydians ;  in  a 
word,  because  among  most  barbarians,  those  who 
learn  mechanical  arts  and  even  their  children  are 
regarded  as  the  meanest  of  their  citizens.  All 
the  Greeks  have  been  nurtured  in  this  principle, 
particularly  the  Lacedaemonians."  * 

"At  Athens  the  citizens  were  veritable  nobles 
who  had  to  concern  themselves  but  with  the  de- 
fense and  the  administration  of  the  community, 
like  the  savage  warriors  from  whom  they  de- 
scended. Since  they  must  thus  have  all  their  time 
free  to  watch  over  the  interests  of  the  republic, 
with  their  mental  and  bodily  strength,  they  laid 
all  labor  upon  the  slaves.  Likewise  at  Lacedae- 
mon,  even  the  women  were  not  allowed  to  spin 
or  weave  that  they  might  not  detract  from  their 
nobility."  f 

The  Romans  recognized  but  two  noble  and 
free  professions,  agriculture  and  arms.  All  the 
citizens  by  right  lived  at  the  expense  of  the  treaS' 
ury  without  being  constrained  to  provide  for  theii 
living  by  any  of  the  sordid  arts  (thus,  they  de- 
signated the  trades),  which  rightfully  belonged 


•  Herodotus,   Book  II. 

t  Biot.    De  L'abolition  de  L'esclavaee  ancien  en  O* 
ddent,  1840. 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  59 

to  slaves.  The  elder  Brutus  to  arouse  the  peo- 
ple, accused  Tarquin,  the  tyrant,  of  the  special 
outrage  of  having  converted  free  citizens  into 
artisans  and  masons.* 

The  ancient  philosophers  had  their  disputes 
upon  the  origin  of  ideas  but  they  agreed  when 
it  came  to  the  abhorrence  of  work.  "Nature," 
said  Plato  in  his  social  Utopia,  his  model  republic, 
"Nature  has  made  no  shoemaker  nor  smith.  Such 
occupations  degrade  the  people  who  exercise 
them.  Vile  mercenaries,  nameless  wretches,  who 
are  by  their  very  condition  excluded  from  poli- 
tical rights.  As  for  the  merchants  accustomed 
to  lying  and  deceiving,  they  will  be  allowed  in 
the  city  only  as  a  necessary  evil.  The  citizen 
who  shall  have  degraded  himself  by  the  com- 
merce of  the  shop  shall  be  prosecuted  for  this 
offense.  If  he  is  convicted,  he  shall  be  con- 
demned to  a  year  in  prison ;  the  punishment  shall 
be  doubled  for  each  repeated  offense."  f 
(Tn  his  "Economics,"  Xenophon  writes,  "The 
people  who  give  themselves  up  to  manual  labor 
are  never  promoted  to  public  offices,  and  with 
good  reason.  The  greater  part  of  them,  con- 
demned to  be  seated  the  whole  day  long,  some 
even  to  endure  the  heat  of  the  fire  continually, 


*  Livy,  Book  I. 

t  Piato's  "Republic,"  Book  V. 


60  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

cannot  fail  to  be  changed  in  body,  and  it  is  al- 
most inevitable  that  the  mind  be  affected."  "What 
honorable  thing  can  come  out  of  a  shop?"  asks 
Cicero.  "What  can  commerce  produce  in  the 
way  of  honor?  Everything  called  shop  is  un- 
worthy an  honorable  man.  Merchants  can  gain 
no  profit  without  lying,  and  what  is  more  shame- 
ful than  falsehood?  Again,  we  must  regard  as 
something  base  and  vile  the  trade  of  those  who 
sell  their  toil  and  industry,  for  whoever  gives  his 
labor  for  money  sells  himself  and  puts  himself 
in  the  rank  of  slaves."*J 

Proletarians,  brutalized  by  the  dogma  of  work, 
listen  to  the  voice  of  these  philosophers,  which 
has  been  concealed  from  you  with  jealous  care: 
A  citizen  who  gives  his  labor  for  money  degrades 
himself  to  the  rank  of  slaves,  he  commits  a  crime 
which  deserves  years  of  imprisonment?) 

Christian  hypocrisy  and  capitalist  utilitarian- 
ism had  not  perverted  these  philosophers  of  the 
ancient  republics.  Speaking  for  free  men,  they 
expressed  their  thought  naively.  Plato,  Aristo- 
tle, those  intellectual  giants,  beside  whom  ouf 
latter  day  philosophers  are  but  pygmies,/wish  the 
citizens  of  their  ideal  republics  to  live  in  the  most 
complete^ leisure,    for    as    Xenophon    observed, 

•  Cicero  s   "De  Officils,"  I,  42. 


Ci 


THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY  6J 

"Work  takes  all  the  time  and  with  it  one  has 
no  leisure  for  the  republic  and  his  friends."^  Ac- 
cording to  Plutarch,  the  great  claim  of  Lycurgus, 
wisest  of  men,  to  the  admiration  of  posterity,  was 
that  he  had  granted  leisure  to  the  citizens  of 
Sparta  by  forbidding  to  them  any  trade  whatever. 
But  our  moralists  of  Christianity  and  capitalism 
will  answer,  "These  thinkers  and  philosophers 
praised  the  institution  of  slavery."  Perfectly 
true,  but  could  it  have  been  otherwise,  granted 
the  economic  and  political  conditions  of  their 
epoch  ?  War  was  the  normal  state  of  ancient  so- 
cieties. The  free  man  was  obliged  to  devote  his 
time  to  discussing  the  affairs  of  state  and  watch- 
ing over  its  defense.  The  trades  were  then  too 
primitive  and  clumsy  for  those  practicing  them 
to  exercise  their  birth-right  of  soldier  and  citi- 
zen; thus  the  philosophers  and  law-givers,  if 
they  wished  to  have  warriors  and  citizens  in  their 
heroic  republics,  were  obliged  to  tolerate  slaves. 
(But  do  not  the  moralists  and  economists  of  cap- 
italism praise  wage  labor,  the  mjxiern  skveryf) 
and  to  what  men  does  the  capitalist  slavery  give 
leisure?  To  people  like  Rothschild,  Schneider, 
and  Madame  Boucicaut,  useless  and  harmful 
slaves  of  their  vices  and  of  their  domestic  serv- 
ants. "The  prejudice  of  slavery  dominated  the 
minds  of  Pythagoras  and  Aristotle," — this  has 


62  THE  RIGHT  TO  BE  LAZY 

been  written  disdainfully ;  and  yet  Aristotle  fore= 
saw :  that  if  every  tool  could  by  itself  execute  its 
proper  function,  as  the  masterpieces  of  Daedalus 
moved  themselves  or  as  the  tripods  of  Vulcan  set 
themselves  spontaneously  at  their  sacred  work ;  if 
for  exaniple  the  shuttles  of  the  weavers  did  their 
own  weaving,  the  foreman  of  the  workshop 
would  have  no  more  need  of  helpers,  nor  the 
master  of  slaves." 

(Aristotle's  dream  is  our  reality.  Our  machines, 
with  breath  of  fire,  with  limbs  of  unwearying 
steel,  with  fruitfulness,  wonderful  inexhaustible, 
accomplish  by  themselves  with  docility  their 
sacred  labor.  And  nevertheless  the  genius  of  the 
great  philosophers  of  capitalism  remains  domi- 
nated by  the  prejudice  of  the  wage  system,  worst 
of  slaveries. )  They  do  not  yet  understand  that 
the  machine  is  the  saviour  of  humanitv^  the  god 
who  shall  reaeem  man  from  the  sordidae  artes 
and  from  working  for  hire^  the  god  who  shall 
give  him  leisure  and  liberty. 


SOCIALISM 
AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

Address  delivered  at  Paris  March  23,  1900, 

AT   A    MEETING    CALLED    BY    THE    GrOUP    OF    COL- 

LECTivisT   Students  attached  to  the  Parti 
Ouvrier  Fran^ais. 

Ladies  and  Gentlemen : — I  am  happy  to  deliver 
this  address  under  the  presidency  of  Vaillant, 
because  it  is  a  pledge  of  the  close  and  lasting 
union  between  our  two  organizations,  and  be- 
cause Vaillant  is  one  of  the  intellectuals  of  the 
socialist  party;  he  is  acknowledged  to  be  the 
most  learned  of  French  socialists  and  perhaps 
of  European  socialists,  now  that  Marx,  Engels 
and  Lavroff  are  no  longer  with  us. 

The  group  of  collectivist  students  which  has 
organized  this  conference,  has  been  led  to  choose 
this  subject,  because  French  socialism  has  just 
passed  through  a  crisis  which  is  not  exactly  one 
of  growth,  though  such  it  has  been  called    but 

63 


64  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTU«t-S 

which  has  been  caused  by  the  arrival  oi  a  certain 
number  of  bourgeois  intellectuals  within  the 
ranks  of  the  party.  It  is  therefore  interesting 
to  examine  the  situation  of  the  intellectuals  in 
capitalist  society,  their  historic  role  since  the 
revolution  of  1789,  and  the  manner  in  which  the 
bourgeoisie  has  kept  the  promises  it  made  them, 
when  it  was  struggling  against  the  aristocracy* 
The  eighteenth  century  was  the  century  of 
reason — everything,  religion,  philosophy,  science, 
politics,  privileges  of  classes,  of  the  state,  of 
municipalities,  was  submitted  to  its  pitiless  crit- 
icism. Never  in  history  has  there  been  such  a 
fermentation  of  ideas  and  such  a  revolutionary 
preparation  of  men's  minds.  Mirabeau,  who 
himself  played  a  great  role  in  the  ideological 
agitation,  might  well  say  in  the  national  assem- 
bly :  "We  have  no  time  to  think,  but  happily, 
we  have  a  supply  of  ideas."  All  that  was  needed 
was  to  realize  them.  Capitalism,  to  reward  the 
intellectuals  who  had  labored  with  so  much  en- 
thusiasm for  the  coming  of  its  revolution,  prom- 
ised them  honors  and  favors ;  intelligence  and 
wisdom,  as  well  as  virtue,  should  be  the  sole 
privileges  of  the  society  it  was  founding  upon 
the  ruins  of  the  old  order.  Promises  cost  it 
little;  it  announced  to  all  men  that  it  brought 
them   joy  and  happiness,   with  liberty,   equality 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  65 

and  fraternity,  which,  although  eternal  princi- 
ples, were  now  born  for  the  first  time.  Its  social 
world  was  to  be  so  new  that  even  before  the 
Republic  was  proclaimed,  Camille  Desmoulins 
demanded  that  they  begin  a  new  era  which 
should  date  from  the  taking  of  the  Bastile. 

I  need  not  teach  you  what  application  capital- 
ism has  made  of  these  eternal  principles  which 
by  way  of  cynical  raillery,  the  Republic  carves 
on  the  lintels  of  her  prisons,  her  penitentiaries, 
her  barracks  and  her  halls  of  state.*  I  will 
only  remind  you  that  savage  and  barbarous 
tribes,  uncorrupted  by  civilization,  living  under 
the  regime  of  common  property,  without  inscrib- 
ing anywhere  these  eternal  principles,  without 
even  formulating  them,  practice  them  in  a  man- 
ner more  perfect  than  ever  was  dreamed  of  by 
the  capitalists  who  discovered  them  in  1789. 

It  did  not  take  long  to  determine  the  value  of 
the  promises  of  capitalism ;  the  very  day  it 
opened  its  political  shop,  it  commenced  proceed- 
ings in  bankruptcy.  The  constituent  assembly, 
which  formulated  the  Rights  of  man  and  of  the 
citizen  and  proclaimed  equality  before  the  law, 
discussed  and  voted,   in    1790,   an  electoral   act 


*  Ever  since  the  French  Revolution  the  law  has 
required  the  words  "Liberty,  Egalitfe  Fraternity,  to 
be  placed  over  the  door  of  every  public  building  in 
France. — Translator. 


*>6  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

which  established  inequality  before  the  law ;  no 
one  was  to  be  a  voter  but  the  "active  citizen," 
paying  in  money  a  direct  tax  equal  to  three 
days'  labor,  and  no  one  was  to  be  eligible  to 
office  but  the  citizen  paying  a  direct  tax  of  a 
"silver  mark,"  about  55  francs.  "But  under  the 
law  of  the  silver  mark,"  clamored  Loustalot, 
Desmoulins  and  the  intellectualists  without  real 
estate,  "Jean  Jacques  Rousseau,  whose  'Social 
Contract  is  the  bible  of  the  revolution,  would 
be  capable  neither  of  voting  nor  of  holding 
office."  The  electoral  law  deprived  so  many 
citizens  of  political  rights,  that  in  the  municipal 
elections  of  1790,  at  Paris,  a  city  which  counted 
about  half  a  million  inhabitants,  there  were  but 
12,000  voters,  Bailly  was  chosen  mayor  by  10,- 
000  votes. 

If  the  eternal  principles  were  not  new,  it  is 
also  true  that  the  flattering  promises  made  by 
the  intellectuals  had  already  begun  to  be  real- 
ized before  the  advent  of  capitalism  to  power. 
The  church,  which  is  a  theocratic  democracy, 
opens  her  bosom  to  all.  .  That  they  may  enter, 
all  lay  aside  their  titles  and  privileges,  and  all 
can  aspire  to  the  highest  positions ;  popes  have 
risen  from  the  lower  ranks  of  society.  Sixtus 
Fifth  had  in  his  youth  tended  swine.  The 
chuTch  of  the  midW'.e  ages  jealously  attracted  to 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  o7 

herself  the  thinkers  and  men  of  learning,  al- 
though she  respected  the  preference  of  those 
who  wished  to  remain  laymen,  but  extended 
over  them  her  protection  and  her  favors ;  she 
allowed  them  all  boldness  of  thought,  on  the 
single  condition  of  keeping  up  the  appearance 
of  faith,  and  never  leaving  her  enclosure  to  lav- 
ish themselves  upon  the  vulgar.  Thus  Copern- 
icus might  write  and  dedicate  to  the  pope  his 
"treatise  on  the  revolutions  of  the  celestial 
bodies,"  in  which,  contrary  to  the  teaching  of 
the  Bible,  he  proves  that  the  earth  turns  around 
the  sun.  But  Copernicus  was  a  canon  at  Frann- 
bourg  and  he  wrote  in  Latin.  When  a  century 
later  Galileo,  who  was  not  identified  wath  the 
clergy  and  who  on  the  contrary  sought  the  pro- 
tection of  the  secular  authorities,  professed 
publicly,  at  Venice  and  Florence,  the  theories 
of  Copernicus,  the  Vatican  stretched  out  its 
terrible  hand  over  him  and  forced  the  illustri- 
ous old  man  to  deny  his  scientific  belief.  Even 
after  the  crisis  of  Protestantism,  the  church  pre- 
served its  liberality  toward  the  scientists  who 
belonged  to  it.  Mersenne,  a  monk  of  the  order 
of  the  Minimes,  one  of  the  great  geometers  of 
the  seventeenth  century,  a  precursor  and  friend 
of  Descartes,  corresponded  freely  with  Hobbes, 
the  father  of  modern  materialism;  the  notes  of 


68  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

the  French  edition  of  "De  Cive"  contain  frag- 
ments of  this  correspondence. 

The  church,  in  keeping  up  this  Hberal  conduct, 
may  have  been  animated  by  a  disinterested  love 
of  pure  science,  but  what  chiefly  concerned  her 
was  the  interest  of  her  dominancy ;  she  wished 
to  monopolize  the  intellectuals  and  science,  just 
as  in  the  old  theocratic  Egypt  the  priests  had 
done  to  whom  the  Greek  thinkers  resorted  in 
search  of  the  first  elements  of  science  and  phil- 
osophy. 

It  would  be  insulting  capitalism  to  attribute 
to  it  a  disinterested  love  of  science,  which  (from 
its  point  of  view  has  but  one  reason  for  exist- 
ence,  that  of  utilizing  natural  forces  to  the  en- 
hancement of  its  wealth,  y  It  cares  nothing  for 
pure  speculation  and  it  is  by  way  of  self-defence 
that  it  allows  its  scientists  to  devote  their  mental 
energy  to  theoretic  researches  instead  of  ex- 
hausting it  on  practical  applications.  This  con- 
tempt for  pure  speculation  is  shown  under  a 
philosophic  form  in  the  positivism  of  Auguste 
Comte,  who  embodies  so  well  the  narrowness  of 
the  groveling  spirit  of  capitalism. 

But  if  science  apart  from  its  industrial  appli- 
cations does  not  interest  the  bourgeoisie  their 
solicitude  for  the  intellectuals  takes  on  none  of 
the  forms  which  we  saw  in  that  of  the  church, 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  69 

and  nowhere  is  their  indifference  to  them  better 
shown  than  in  the  relative  position  of  material 
property  and  of  intellectual  property  before  the 
law. 

Alaterial  property,  whatever  its  origin,  is  by 
capitalist  law  a  thing  eternal ;  it  is  forever  as- 
sured to  its  possessor;  it  is  handed  down  from 
father  to  son  to  the  end  of  the  centuries,  and  no 
civil  or  political  power  may  lay  upon  it  a  sac- 
rilegious hand.,  We  have  lately  seen  a  charac- 
teristic example  of  this  inviolability  of  material 
property. 

The  keeper  of  the  signal  station  at  Durban 
transmitted  to  the  Boers  heliographic  dispatches 
informing  them  regarding  the  ships  which  en- 
tered the  harbor,  the  men,  the  horses  and  the 
munitions  of  war  which  they  transported.  His 
treason  brought  him  125,000  francs,  which,  like 
an  intelligent  capitalist,  he  deposited  in  the  bank. 
The  English  military  authorities  seized  the 
traitor,  condemned  him  and  shot  him,  but  they 
respected  his  property  so  honorably  acquired, 
and  his  widow  and  son  are  now  its  legitimate  pos- 
sessors. The  law,  apart  from  certain  variations, 
being  the  same  in  all  capitalist  countries,  things 
go  on  in  France  as  in  England.  No  authority 
could  lay  hand  on  the  property  of  Bazaine,  nor 
make  De  Lesseps,  Cottu  and  their  families  dis- 


to  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

gorge  the  millions  artfully  extracted  from  the 
"lambs"  on  Panama  canal  stock. 

This  legal  sanctity  of  property  is  a  new  thing, 
in  France  it  dates  from  the  revolution  of  1789. 
The  old  regime,  which  had  small  respect  for 
this  sort  of  property,  authorized  the  confiscation 
of  the  property  of  those  legally  condemned,  and 
the  abolition  of  confiscation  is  one  of  the  first 
reforms  demanded  in  the  petitions  of  Paris  and 
several  provincial  cities  to  the  states  general. 
Capitalism,  by  forbidding  the  confiscation  of 
property  obtained  by  fraudulent  and  infamous 
means,  proclaims  that  the  source  of  its  fortune 
is  quite  as  fraudulent  and  infamous  as  that  of 
criminals  and  traitors. 

Capitalist  law  has  none  of  these  amenities  for 
intellectual  property.  Literary  and  artistic  prop- 
erty such  as  the  law  protects  at  all  has  but  a 
precarious  life,  limited  to  the  life  of  the  author 
and  a  certain  time  after  his  death — fifty  years 
according  to  the  latest  legislation ;  that  time 
passed,  it  lapses  into  common  property;  for  ex- 
ample, beginning  with  March  of  this  year,  any 
publisher  has  the  right  to  bring  out  for  his  own 
profit  the  works  of  Balzac,  the  genius  of  roman- 
tic literature. 

Literary  property,  though  a  matter  of  interest 
to  publishers,  who  are  certainly  few  in  number, 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  71 

brings  no  benefit  to  the  mass  of  the  capitalist 
class,  blit  not  so  with  property  in  inventions, 
which  is  of  prime  importance  to  all  the  manu- 
facturing and  mercantile  capitalists.  Consequent- 
ly over  it  the  law  extends  no  protection.  The 
inventor,  if  he  wishes  to  defend  his  intellectual 
property  against  capitalist  pirates,  must  begin 
by  buying  that  right,  taking  out  a  patent,  which 
he  must  renew  every  year ;  on  the  day  he  misses 
a  payment,  his  intellectual  property  becomes  the 
lawful  prey  of  the  robbers  of  capitalism.  Even 
if  he  pays,  he  can  secure  that  right  only  for  a 
time ;  in  France,  fourteen  years.  And  during 
these  few  years,  not  long  enough  generally  to 
get  his  invention  fully  introduced  into  practical 
industry,  it  is  he,  the  inventor,  who  at  his  own 
expense  has  to  set  in  motion  the  machinery  of 
the  law  against  the  capitalist  pirates  who  rob 
him. 

The  trade-mark,  which  is  a  capitalistic  prop- 
erty that  never  required  any  intellectual  effort, 
is  on  the  contrary  indefinitely  protected  by  law 
like  material  property. 

It  is  with  reluctance  that  the  capitalist  class 
has  granted  the  inventor  the  right  of  defending 
his  intellectual  property,  for  by  virtue  of  its  po- 
sition as  the  ruling  class  it  regards  itself  as  en- 
titled to  the  fruits  of  intellectual  labor  as  well 


72  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

as  of  manual  labor;  just  as  the  feudal  lord  as- 
serted his  right  of  possession  over  the  property 
of  his  serfs.  The  history  of  the  inventors  of  our 
century  is  the  monstrous  story  of  their  spoliation 
by  the  capitalists;  it  is  a  long  and  melancholy 
roll  of  martyrs.  The  inventor,  by  the  very  fact 
of  his  genius,  is  condemned  with  his  family  to 
ruin  and  suffering. 

It  is  not  only  inventions  requiring  long  and 
laborious  study,  heavy  outlay  for  their  comple- 
tion and  long  time  for  their  introduction,  that 
plunge  the  inventor  into  the  inferno  of  poverty; 
this  is  equally  true  of  inventions  that  are  most 
simple,  most  immediately  applicable  and  most 
fertile  in  rich  results.  I  will  mentiton  but  one  ex- 
ample :  there  lately  died  at  Paris  in  extreme  pov- 
erty a  man  whose  invention  saves  millions  of 
francs  a  year  to  the  railroads  and  mining  com- 
panies; he  had  discovered  a  way  to  utilize  the 
mountains  of  coal  dust  that  encumbered  the 
neighborhood  of  wharfs  and  mines  by  convert- 
ing it  into  "briquettes,"  such  as  are  today  in  com- 
mon use  for  fuel. 

The  capitalist  bourgeoisie,  the  most  revolu- 
tionary class  that  ever  oppressed  human  soci- 
eties, cannot  increase  its  wealth  without  continu- 
ously revolutionizing  the  means  of  production, 
continuously    incorporating    into    its    industrial 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  73 

equipment  new  applications  of  mechanics,  chem- 
istry and  physics.  Its  thirst  for  inventions  is  so 
insatiable  that  it  creates  factories  for  inventions. 
Certain  American  capitalists  united  in  construct- 
ing for  Edison  at  Menlo  Park  the  most  wonder- 
ful laboratory  in  the  world,  and  in  putting  at 
his  disposal  trained  scientists,  chosen  workmen, 
and  the  ordinary  materials  necessary  to  make  and 
keep  on  making  inventions  which  the  capitalists 
patent,  exploit  or  sell.  Edison,  who  is  himself 
a  shrewd  business  man,  has  taken  care  to  secure 
for  himself  a  part  of  the  benefits  brought  by  the 
Menlo  Park  inventions. 

But  not  all  inventors  are  able  like  Edison  to 
dictate  terms  to  the  capitalists  who  equip  inven- 
tion factories.  The  Thompson-Houston  Com- 
pany at  Paris  and  Siemens  at  London  and  Ber- 
lin,* in  connection  with  their  plants  for  turning 
out  electrical  machinery,  have  laboratories  where 
ingenious  men  are  kept  busy  searching  out  new 
applications  of  electricity.  At  Frankfort  the  man^ 
ufactory  of  aniline  dyes,  the  largest  in  the  world, 
where  anti-pyrine,  that  mineral  quinine,  was  dis- 
covered, keeps  on  its  pay  roll  more  than  a  hun- 
dred chemists  to  discover  new  products  of  coal- 

*  It  is  a  well-known  fact  that  in  the  American 
establishments  of  these  and  similar  companies  each 
workman  before  receiving  employment  must  sign  pa- 
pers transferring  to  the  corporation  the  title  to  all 
inventions  made  by  him  while  in  its  service.— Translator, 


74  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

tar.  Each  discovery  is  at  once  patented  by  the 
house,  which,  by  way  of  encouragement,  gives 
a  reward  to  the  inventor. 

We  may  up  to  a  certain  point  regard  all  fac- 
tories and  workshops  as  laboratories  for  inven- 
tions, since  a  considerable  number  of  improve- 
ments in  machinery  have  been  devised  by  work- 
men in  the  course  of  their  work.  The  inventor 
having  no  money  to  patent  and  apply  his  discov- 
ery, the  employer  takes  out  the  patent  in  his  own 
name,  and  in  accordance  with  the  spirit  of  cap- 
italist justice,  it  is  he  who  reaps  all  the  benefit. 
When  the  government  takes  it  into  its  head  to 
rewards  talent,  it  is  the  employer  who  receives 
the  decoration ;  the  inventive  workman,  who  is 
not  an  intellectual,  continues  to  revolve  like  the 
other  machines  under  the  black  and  greasy  num- 
ber which  distinguishes  him,  and  as  in  this  cap- 
italist world  he  must  be  content  with  little,  he 
consoles  himself  for  his  poverty  by  the  reflection 
that  his  invention  is  bringing  wealth  and  honor 
to  his  employer. 

The  capitalist  class,  which  to  increase  its 
wealth  is  in  pressing  need  of  inventions,  is  in 
even  more  imperative  need  of  intellectuals  to 
supervise  their  application  and  to  direct  its  in- 
dustrial machinery.  The  capitalists,  before  they 
equipped  invention  factories,  had  organized  fac- 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  75 

tories  to  turn  out  intellectuals.  Dollfus,  Scherer- 
Kestner  and  other  employes  of  Alsace,  the  most 
intelligent,  most  philanthropic  and  consequently 
the  heaviest  exploiters  in  France  before  the  war, 
had  founded  with  their  spare  pennies  at  Mul- 
house,  schools  of  design,  of  chemistry  and  of 
physics,  where  the  brightest  children  of  their 
workmen  were  instructed  gratis,  in  order  that 
they  might  always  have  at  hand  and  at  reason- 
able figure  the  intellectual  capacities  required 
for  carrying  on  their  industries.  Twenty  years 
ago  the  directors  of  the  Mulhouse  school  per- 
suaded the  municipal  council  of  Paris  to  establish 
the  city  school  of  chemistry  and  physics.  At  the 
beginning,  whether  it  is  still  the  case  I  do  not 
know,  the  pupils  were  recruited  in  the  common 
schools,  they  received  a  higher  education,  gratis, 
a  dinner  at  noon  at  the  school,  and  fifty  francs  a 
month  to  indemnify  the  parents  for  the  loss  from 
the  fact  that  their  sons  were  not  in  the  work- 
shop. 

On  the  platform  of  the  constituent  assembly 
of  1790  the  Marquis  of  Foucault  could  declare 
that  to  be  a  laborer  it  was  not  necessary  to  know 
how  to  read  and  write.  The  necessities  of  in- 
dustrial  production  compel  the  capitalist  of  to- 
day to  speak  in  language  altogether  different; 
his  economic  interests  and  not  his  love  of  hu- 


76  SOaAUSM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

manity  and  of  science  force  him  to  encourage 
and  to  develop  both  elementary  and  higher  edu- 
cation. 

But  the  slave  merchants  of  ancient  Rome 
were,  by  the  same  title,  patrons  of  education. 
To  the  more  intelligent  of  their  human  merchan- 
dise they  gave  instruction  in  medicine,  philos- 
ophy, Greek  literature,  music,  science,  etc.  The 
education  of  the  slave  enhanced  his  market 
value.  The  slave  who  was  an  expert  cook 
brought  a  better  figure  than  the  slave  doctor, 
philosopher  or  literator.  In  our  days  it  is  still 
so;  the  big  capitalists  pay  their  chief  cooks  bet- 
ter than  the.  state  pays  the  professors  of  liberal 
arts,  even  though  they  be  members  of  the  Insti- 
tute. But  contrary  to  the  practice  of  the  Roman 
slave  merchants,  our  capitalist  class  lavishes  in- 
struction only  in  order  to  depress  the  selling 
price  of  intellectual  capacity. 

Greek  mythology  tells  how  Midas  had  the  gift 
of  turning  everything  into  gold ;  the  capitalist 
class  has  a  similar  property,  it  transforms  every- 
thing that  it  touches  into  merchandise ;  it  has 
done  this  for  intellectual  capacities ;  chemists, 
engineers  and  Latin  scholars  are  bought  like  she- 
asses  and  guano. 

A  voice:  "And  they  buy  deputies,  too!" 

People  who  have  no  tallow  nor  veal  nor  socks 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  77 

to  sell  have  their  conscience    and    their    votes; 
when  they  are  deputies,  they  are  bought. 

When  intellectual  capacities  become  merchan- 
dise they  have  to  be  treated  like  other  merchan- 
dise, and  they  are.  When  there  are  many  oysters 
in  the  market  the  price  of  oysters  goes  down, 
but  when  the  arrivals  are  scarce  the  price  goes 
up.  When  chemists  and  engineers  are  plenty  on 
the  labor  market,  the  price  of  inventors  and  of 
chemists  goes  down.  Now  that  the  Central 
School  and  the  School  of  Physics  and  Chemistry 
turn  out  yearly  upon  the  pavements  of  Paris 
chemists  by  the  dozen,  their  price  has  consider- 
ably gone  down.  Twenty  years  ago  the  capital- 
ist paid  a  chemist  reasonably,  he  gave  him  $ioo 
to  $120  a  month  and  engaged  him  by  the  year. 
The  employers  whose  regard  for  an  employee  is 
measured  by  what  they  have  to  pay  him,  were 
full  of  politeness  and  consideration  for  their 
chemists  who  cost  so  dear.  But  since  they  have 
been  abundant,  their  price  has  fallen  to  $40  and 
$30  a  month ;  in  the  north  they  are  not  engaged 
by  the  year  but  for  the  sugar  season,  which  lasts 
three  or  four  months,  at  the  end  of  which  they 
are  discharged  with  the  workmen.  Go  and  shift 
for  yourself,  says  the  employer.  Next  fall  when 
the  beets  come  I  know  I  shall  find  chemists  to 
superintend  making  them  into  sugar. 


78  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

The  chemists  are  not  exceptional;  you  know 
only  too  well  that  in  all  branches  there  is  an 
overproduction  of  intellectuals,  and  that  when  a 
place  is  vacant,  tens  and  hundreds  offer  them- 
selves to  fill  it ;  and  it  is  this  pressure  which  per- 
mits the  capitalists  to  lower  the  price  of  the  in- 
tellectuals and  to  put  it  even  below  the  wage  o*t 
the  manual  laborer. 

Poverty  is  harder  for  the  intellectual  than  for 
the  workingman;  it  bruises  him  morally  and 
physically.  The  workingman,  enduring  hard- 
ships from  childhood  and  knocking  about  the 
street  and  the  shops,  is  accustomed  to  enduring 
the  troubles  of  life ;  the  intellectual,  brought  up 
in  a  hot-house,  has  the  life  bleached  out  of  him 
by  the  shadow  of  the  college  walls,  his  nervous 
system  is  over-developed  and  takes  on  an  un- 
healthy impressionability.  What  the  working- 
man  endures  thoughtlessly  is  to  him  a  painful 
shock.  The  intellectual  is  wounded  to  the  depths 
of  his  moral  being  by  the  exigencies  of  a  wage- 
worker's  life.  With  the  same  or  even  a  higher 
wage  the  intellectual  is  in  a  worse  economic  con- 
dition than  the  laborer,  for  the  latter  may  dress 
as  cheaply  as  he  likes,  but  the  former,  if  only  not 
to  offend  the  eye  of  his  employer  and  his  chiefs 
with  whom  he  is  brought  in  contact  is  obliged  to 
dress  expensively  and  even  elegantly.     He  must 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  79 

save  on  his  food  what  he  has  to  spend  on  his 
clothing. 

The  capitaHsts  have  degraded  the  intellectuals 
below  the  economic  level  of  the  manual  laborers. 
This  is  their  reward  for  having  so  magnificently 
prepared  the  way  for  the  bourgeois  revolution  of 
the  eighteenth  century. 

Jaures  in  his  preface  to  the  Socialist  History 
of  France  says  that  "the  intellectual  bourgeoisie, 
offended  by  a  brutal  and  commercial  society  and 
disenchanted  with  the  bourgeois  power,  is  rally- 
ing to  the  support  of  socialism."  Unfortunately 
nothing  could  be  less  exact.  This  transforma- 
tion of  the  intellectual  faculties  into  merchan- 
dise, which  ought  to  have  filled  the  intellectuals 
with  wrath  and  indignation,  leaves  them  indif- 
ferent. Never  would  the  free  citizen  of  the  an- 
cient republics  of  Athens  and  Rome  have  sub- 
mitted to  such  degradation.  The  free  man  who 
sells  his  work,  says  Cicero,  lowers  himself  to  the 
rank  of  the  slaves.  Socrates  and  Plato  were  in- 
dignant against  the  Sophists  who  required  pay 
for  their  philosophic  teaching,  for  to  Socrates 
and  Plato  thought  was  too  noble  a  thing  to  be 
bought  and  sold  like  carrots  and  shoes.  Even 
the  French  clergy  of  1789  resented  as  a  mortal 
insult  the  proposition  to  pay  a  salary  for  wor- 


80  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

ship.  But  our  intellectuals  are  accustoming, 
themselves  to  such  degradation. 

Spurred  on  by  the  mercantile  passion,  they  are 
never  better  satisfied  with  themselves  or  with  so- 
ciety than  when  they  succeed  in  selling  their  in- 
tellectual merchandise  at  a  good  price;  they  have 
even  come  to  the  point  of  making  its  selling  price 
the  measure  of  its  value.  Zola,  who  is  one  of 
the  most  distinguished  representatives  of  literary 
intellectualism,  estimates  the  artistic  value  of  a 
novel  by  the  number  of  editions  sold.  To  sell 
their  intellectual  merchandise  has  become  in 
them  such  an  all-absorbing  principle  that  if  one 
speaks  to  them  of  socialism,  before  they  inquire 
into  its  theories,  they  ask  whether  in  the  social- 
istic society  intellectual  labor  will  be  paid  for 
and  whether  it  will  be  rewarded  equally  with 
manual  labor. 

Imbeciles !  they  have  eyes  but  they  see  not  that 
it  is  the  capitalist  bourgeoisie  which  establishes 
that  degrading-  equality ;  and  to  increase  its 
wealth  degrades  intellectual  labor  to  the  point  of 
paying  it  at  a  lower  rate  than  manual  labor. 

We  should  have  to  put  off  the  triumph  of  so- 
cialism not  to  the  year  2,000  but  to  the  end  of 
the  world  if  we  had  to  wait  upon  the  delicate, 
shrinking  and  impressionable  hesitancy  of  the  in- 
tellectuals. The  history  of  the  century  is  at  hand 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  81 

to  teach  us  just  how  much  we  have  a  right  to  ex- 
pect from  these  gentlemen. 

Since  1789  governments  of  the  most  diverse 
and  opposed  character  have  succeeded  each  other 
in  France;  and  always,  without  hesitation,  the 
intellectuals  have  hastened  to  offer  their  devoted 
services.  I  am  not  merely  speaking  of  those  two- 
for-a-cent  intellectuals  who  litter  up  the  news- 
papers, the  parliaments  and  the  economic  asso- 
ciations ;  but  I  mean  the  scientists,  the  university 
professors,  the  members  of  the  Institute ;  the 
higher  they  raise  their  heads,  the  lower  they  bow 
the  knee. 

Princes  of  science,  who  ought  to  have  con- 
versed on  equal  terms  with  kings  and  emperors, 
have  marketed  their  glory  to  buy  offices  and 
favors  from  ephemeral  ministers.  Cuvier,  one 
of  the  mightiest  geniuses  of  the  modern  era, 
whom  the  revolution  took  from  the  household 
of  a  nobleman  to  make  of  him  at  twenty-five 
years  one  of  the  Museum  professors,  Cuvier  took 
the  oath  of  allegiance  and  served  with  fidelity  the 
Republic,  Napoleon,  Louis  XVIII,  Charles  X 
and  Louis  Philippe,  the  last  of  whom  created 
him  a  peer  of  France  to  reward  him  for  his 
career  of  servility. 

To  devote  one's  self  to  all  governments  with- 
out distinction   is  not  enough.     Pasteur  placed 


82  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

his  glorious  name  at  the  service  of  the  financiers, 
who  placed  him  in  the  administrative  council  of 
the  Credit  Foncier,  side  by  side  with  Jules 
Simon,  with  dukes  and  counts,  with  senators, 
deputies  and  ex-ministers,  in  order  to  entrap  the 
"lambs."  When  De  Lesseps  was  equipping  his 
colossal  swindle  of  the  Panama  canal,  he  enrolled 
the  intellectuals  of  the  Institute,  of  the  French 
Academy,  of  literature,  of  the  clergy,  of  all  the 
circles  of  higher  life. 

It  is  not  in  the  circle  of  the  intellectuals,  de- 
graded by  centuries  of  capitalist  oppression,  that 
we  must  seek  examples  of  civic  courage  and 
moral  dignity.  They  have  not  even  the  sense  of 
professional  class-consciousness.  At  the  time 
of  the  Dreyfus  affair,  a  certain  minister  dis- 
charged, as  if  he  had  been  a  mere  prison  guard, 
one  of  the  professors  of  chemistry  in  the  Poly- 
technic school  who  had  had  the  rare  courage  to 
give  public  expression  to  his  opinion.  When  in 
a  factory  the  employer  dismisses  a  workman  in 
too  arbitrary  a  fashion,  his  comrades  grumble, 
and  sometimes  quit  work,  even  though  misery 
and  hunger  await  them  in  the  street. 

All  his  colleagues  in  the  Polytechnic  school 
bowed  their  heads  in  silence ;  each  one  crouched 
in  self- regarding  fear,  and  what  is  still  more 
characteristic,  not  a  single  partisan  of  Dreyfus 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  83 

in  the  Society  of  the  Rights  of  Man  or  in  the 
ranks  of  the  press  raised  a  voice  to  remind  them 
of  the  idea  of  professional  solidarity.  The  in- 
tellectuals, who  on  all  occasions  display  their 
transcendental  ethics,  have  still  a  long  road  to 
travel  before  they  reach  the  moral  plane  of  the 
working  class  and  of  the  socialist  party. 

The  scientists  have  not  only  sold  themselves  to 
the  governments  and  the  financiers ;  they  have 
also  sold  science  itself  to  the  capitalist-bour- 
geoisie. When  in  the  eighteenth  century  there 
was  need  to  prepare  the  minds  of  men  for  the 
revolution,  by  sapping  the  ideologic  foundations 
of  aristocratic  society,  then  science  fulfilled  its 
sublime  mission  of  freedom ;  it  was  revolution- 
ary; it  furiously  attacked  Christianity  and  the 
intuitional  philosophy.  But  when  the  victorious 
bourgeoisie  decided  to  base  its  new  power  on  re- 
ligion, it  commanded  its  scientists,  its  philoso' 
phers  and  its  men  of  letters  to  raise  up  what 
they  had  overthrown  ;  they  responded  to  the  need 
with  enthusiasm.  They  reconstructed  what  they 
had  demolished ;  they  proved  by  scientific,  senti- 
mental and  romantic  argument  the  existence  of 
God  the  father,  of  Jesus  the  son  and  of  Mary  the 
virgin  mother.  I  do  not  believe  history  offers 
a  spectacle  equal  to  that  presented  in  the  first 
years  of  the  nineteenth  century  by  the  philoso- 


84  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

phers,  the  scientists  and  the  Hterary  men,  who 
from  revohitionaries  and  materiaUsts  suddenly 
transformed  themselves  into  reactionaries,  in- 
tuitionalists  and  CathoUcs, 

This  backward  movement  still  continues ;  when 
Darwin  published  his  Origin  of  Species,  which 
took  away  from  God  his  role  of  creator  in  the 
organic  world,  as  Franklin  had  despoiled  him  of 
his  thunderbolt,  we  saw  the  scientists,  big  and 
little,  university  professors  and  members  of  the 
Institute,  enrolling  themselves  under  the  orders 
of  Flourens,  who  for  his  own  part  had  at  least 
his  eighty  years  for  an  excuse,  that  they  might 
demolish  the  Darwinian  theory,  which  was  dis- 
pleasing to  the  government  and  hurtful  to  relig- 
ious beliefs.  The  intellectuals  exhibited  that 
painful  spectacle  in  the  fatherland  of  Lamark 
and  of  Geoffroy  Saint-Hilaire,  the  creators  of 
the  evolution  theory,  which  Darwin  completed 
and  made  proof  against  criticism. 

Today,  now  that  the  clerical  anxiety  is  some- 
what appeased,  the  scientists  venture  to  profess 
the  evolution  theory,  which  they  never  opposed 
without  a  protest  from  their  scientific  conscience, 
but  they  turn  it  against  socialism  so  as  to  keep 
in  the  good  graces  of  the  capitalists.  Herbert 
Spencer,  Haeckel  and  the  greatest  men  in  the 
school  of  Darwinism  demonstrate  that  the  classi- 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  85 

fication  of  individuals  into  rich  and  poor,  idlers 
and  laborers,  capitalists  and  wage-earners,  is  the 
necessary  result  of  the  inevitable  laws  of  nature, 
instead  of  being  the  fulfillment  of  the  will  and 
the  justice  of  God.  Natural  selection,  they  say, 
which  has  differentiated  the  organs  of  the  hu- 
man body,  has  forever  fixed  the  ranks  and  the 
functions  of  the  social  body.  They  have,  through 
servility,  even  lost  the  logical  spirit.  They  are 
indignant  against  Aristotle  because  he,  being  un- 
able to  conceive  of  the  abolition  of  slavery,  de- 
clared that  the  slave  was  marked  off  by  nature; 
but  they  fail  to  see  that  they  are  saying  some- 
thing equally  monstrous  when  they  affirm  that 
natural  selection  assigns  to  each  one  his  place  in 
society. 

Thus  it  is  no  longer  God  or  religion  which 
condemn  the  workers  to  wretchedness — it  is  sci- 
ence. Never  was  there  an  intellectual  bankruptcy 
more  fraudulent. 

M.  Brunetieres,  one  of  those  intellectuals  who 
do  not  feel  their  degradation  and  who  joyfully 
fulfill  their  servile  task,  was  right  when  he  pro- 
claimed the  failure  of  science.  He  does  not  sus- 
pect how  colossal  this  bankruptcy  is. 

Science,  the  great  emancipator,  that  has  tamed 
the  powers  of  nature,  and  might  in  so  doing  have 
freed  man  from  toil  to  allow  him  to  develop  free- 


86  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

ly  his  faculties  of  mind  and  body;  science,  be- 
come the  slave  of  capital,  has  done  nothing  but 
supply  means  for  capitalists  to  increase  their 
wealth,  and  to  intensify  their  exploitation  of  the 
working  class.  Its  most  wonderful  applications 
to  industrial  technique  have  brought  to  the  chil- 
dren, the  women  and  the  men  of  the  working 
class  nothing  but  overwork  and  misery ! 

The  middle-class  revolutionary  party  of  1789 
cried  out  in  horror  and  indignation  against  the 
lords,  who  through  the  long  summer  nights  com- 
pelled their  serfs  to  beat  the  ponds  near  their 
castles  in  order  to  keep  the  frogs  from  croak- 
ing. What  would  they  say  if  they  saw  what  we 
see?  Improvements  in  lighting  date  from  the 
capitalist  period.  At  the  end  of  the  last  century 
Argant  and  Carcel  invented  the  lamp  with  a 
double  current  of  air,  at  the  beginning  of  this 
Chevreul  invented  the  stearic  candle,  then  gas 
was  discovered,  then  petroleum,  then  the  electric 
light,  turning  night  into  day.  What  benefits 
have  these  scientific  improvements  in  lighting 
brought  to  the  workers  ?  They  have  enabled  em» 
ployers  to  impose  night  work  upon  millions  of 
proletarians,  not  in  the  midsummer  nights  and 
in  the  balmy  air  of  the  fields,  but  through  nights 
of  summer  and  winter  in  the  poisonous  air  of  the 
workshops  and  factories.     The  industrial  appli- 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  87 

cations  of  mechanics  and  chemistry  have  trans- 
formed the  happy  and  stimulating  work  of  the 
artisan  into  a  torture  which  exhausts  and  kills 
the  proletarian. 

When  science  subdued  the  forces  of  nature  to 
the  service  of  man,  ought  she  not  to  have  given 
leisure  to  the  workers  that  they  might  develop 
themselves  physically  and  intellectually ;  ought 
she  not  to  have  changed  the  "vale  of  tears"  into 
a  dwelling  place  of  peace  and  joy?  I  ask  you, 
has  not  science  failed  in  her  mission  of  emanci- 
pation ? 

The  obtuse  capitalist  himself  is  conscious  of 
this  failure ;  so  he  directs  his  economists  and  his 
other  intellectual  domestics  to  prove  to  the  work- 
ing class  that  it  has  never  been  so  happy  and 
that  its  lot  goes  on  improving. 

The  economists,  considering  that  to  deserve 
the  good  graces  of  the  capitalists  it  was  not 
enough  to  falsify  economic  facts,  are  suppressing 
economic  science,  which  is  becoming  dangerous 
for  the  domination  of  capital.  Ever  since  Adam 
Smith  and  Ricardo  they  go  on  repeating  the 
same  errors  regarding  value,  regarding  the  pro- 
ductivity of  the  predatory  and  idle  capitalist, 
compiling  facts  and  arranging  statistics  which 
guide  the  capitalists  in  their  speculations ;  but 
they  dare  not  draw  conclusions  and  build  systems 


88  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

with  the  materials  that  they  have  accumulated. 
When  Ricardo  wrote,  the  phenomena  of  modern 
production  were  beginning  their  evolution,  their 
communist  tendencies  could  not  be  perceived, 
one  could  then  study  them  without  taking  sides 
and  could  build  up  a  science  without  fear  of 
wounding  the  interests  of  capital.  But  now  that 
they  have  arrived  at  their  full  development  and 
show  clearly  their  communal  tendencies,  the  eco- 
nomists shut  their  eyes  that  they  may  not  see, 
and  they  wage  war  against  the  principles  estab- 
lished by  Ricardo,  which  after  having  served 
as  a  basis  for  the  old  bourgeois  economy,  have 
become  the  points  of  departure  of  the  Marxian 
economy.  To  take  a  whack  at  the  socialist  theo- 
ries and  put  themselves  at  the  service  of  the 
financiers,  like  barkers  and  fakirs  of  their  bogus 
goods,  are  the  intellectual  functions  of  the  econo- 
mists. Latterly  the  owners  of  silver  mines  have 
enlisted  them  to  sing  the  praises  of  bimetallism, 
while  Cecil  Rhodes,  Barnato,  Beit,  Robbers  & 
Company  called  them  in  to  boom  the  Transvaal 
gold  mines. 

The  intellectuals  of  art  and  literature,  like  the 
jesters  of  the  old  feudal  courts,  are  the  enter- 
tainers of  the  class  which  pays  them.  To  satisfy 
the  tastes  of  the  capitalists  and  beguile  their 
leisure — this  is  their  sole  artistic  aim.     The  men 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  89 

of  letters  are  so  well  broken  to  this  servile  duty 
that  they  do  not  understand  the  spirit  of  Moliere, 
their  great  ancestor,  all  the  while  that  they  adore 
the  letter  of  his  works.  Moliere  is  the  writer 
most  written  about  in  France;  learned  men  have 
devoted  themselves  to  gathering  up  the  scattered 
fragments  of  his  erratic  and  careless  youth,  to 
fixing  the  date  and  the  hour  of  the  representa- 
tions of  his  comedies;  if  they  had  unearthed  an 
authentic  piece  of  excrement  from  him  they 
would  have  set  it  in  gold  and  would  kiss  it  de- 
votedly, but  the  spirit  of  Moliere  escapes  them. 
You  have  read,  as  I  have,  many  critical  analyses 
of  his  dramas.  Did  you  ever  find  one  of  them 
which  brought  out  in  clear  light  the  role  of  this 
militant  playwright,  who  more  than  a  century 
before  Beaumarchais  and  before  revolution,  at 
Versailles,  in  the  very  court  of  the  great  mon- 
arch, thrust  at  the  nobility  of  the  court  and  of 
the  provinces,  attacked  the  church  before  which 
Descartes  and  the  rest  trembled,  hurled  his  jests 
at  Aristotle,  the  unquestioned  authority  of  La 
Sorbonne,  that  secular  church ;  who  ridiculed 
the  Pyrrhonism  which  the  neo-Kantians  of  our 
own  days  oppose  to  the  materialist  philosophy  of 
Marxian  socialism,  but  which  then  was  the 
weapon  of  the  Catholics,  of  Pascal,  of  Huet,  the 
bishop  of  Avranches,  to  strike  and  to  overthrow 


90  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

human  reason,  with  its  impudent  desire  or  rea':h- 
ing  knowledge  by  its  own  strength.  Pitiful, 
wretched  reason,  clamored  these  Kantians  be- 
fore Kant,  you  can  know  nothing  without  the 
aid  of  faith !  Moliere  is  unique  in  European  lit- 
terature,  you  must  go  back  to  the  epoch  of  glori- 
ous Athens  to  find  his  counterpart  in  Aristo- 
phanes. 

If  the  bourgeois  critics  timidly  and  unintelli- 
gently  mention  this  side  of  Moliere,  there  is  an- 
other of  which  their  ignorance  is  complete.  Mo- 
liere was  the  man  of  his  class,  the  champion  of 
the  bourgeois  class.  Like  the  socialists  who  say 
to  the  workers,  "Break  with  the  liberal  bour- 
geoisie, which  deceives  you  when  it  does  not 
slaughter  you ;"  he  cried  to  the  Georges  Dandins 
and  to  the  "bourgeois  noblemen,"  "Avoid  the 
nobles  like  pests ;  they  deceive  you,  mock  you 
and  rob  you." 

The  great  capitalist  bourgeoisie  does  not 
choose  to  work,  either  with  its  hands  or  its  brain ; 
it  chooses  merely  to  drink,  to  eat,  to  practice 
lewdness  and  to  look  dignified  in  its  beastly  and 
cumbersome  luxury ;  it  does  not  even  deign  to 
occupy  itself  with  politics ;  men  like  Rothschild, 
De  Lesseps,  Vanderbilt,  Carnegie,  Rockefeller, 
do  not  run  for  office ;  they  find  it  more  econom- 
ical to  buy  the  deputies  than  the  voters,  and  more 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  91 

convenient  to  put  their  clerks  into  the  ministries 
than  to  take  part  in  parliamentary  struggles.  The 
big  capitalists  interest  themselves  only  in  the 
operations  of  the  stock  exchange,  which  afford 
the  delights  of  gambling;  they  dignify  these  by 
the  pompous  name  of  "speculations,"  —  a  word 
formerly  reserved  for  the  highest  processes  of 
philosophical  or  mathematical  thought.  The  cap- 
italists are  getting  themselves  replaced  in  the 
supervision  and  management  of  the  great  indus- 
trial and  commercial  enterprises  by  intellectuals, 
who  carry  them  on,  and  usually  are  well  paid  for 
doing  so.  These  intellectuals  of  industry  and 
politics,  the  privileged  portion  of  the  wage  class, 
imagine  that  they  are  an  integral  part  of  the 
capitalist  class,  while  they  are  only  its  servants; 
on  every  occasion  they  take  up  its  defense 
against  the  working  class,  which  finds  in  them 
its  worst  enemies. 

Intellectuals  of  this  description  can  never  be 
led  into  socialism ;  their  interests  are  too  closely 
bound  up  with  those  of  the  capitalist  class  for 
them  to  detach  themselves  and  turn  against  it. 
But  below  these  favored  few  there  is  a  swarm- 
ing and  famishing  throng  of  intellectuals  whose 
lot  grows  worse  in  proportion  to  the  increase  of 
thier  numbers.  These  intellectuals  belong  to  so- 
cialism.    They  ought  to  be  already  in  our  ranks. 


92  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

Their  education  ought  to  have  given  them  the 
necessary  intelligence  to  deal  with  social  prob- 
lems, but  it  is  this  very  education  which  ob- 
structs their  hearing  and  keeps  them  away  from 
socialism.  They  think  their  education  confers 
on  them  a  social  privilege,  that  it  will  permit 
them  to  get  through  the  world  by  themselves, 
each  making  his  own  way  in  life  by  crowding 
out  his  neighbor  or  standing  on  the  shoulders 
of  everyone  else.  They  imagine  that  their  pov- 
erty is  transitory  and  that  they  only  need  a  stroke 
of  good  luck  to  transform  them  into  capitalists. 
Education,  they  think,  is  the  lucky  number  in  the 
social  lottery,  and  it  will  bring  them  the  grand 
prize.  They  do  not  perceive  that  this  ticket 
given  them  by  the  capitalist  class  is  a  fraud,  that 
labor,  whether  manual  or  intellectual,  has  no 
other  chance  than  to  earn  its  daily  pittance,  that 
it  has  nothing  to  hope  for  but  to  be  exploited, 
and  that  the  more  capitalism  goes  on  developing, 
the  more  do  the  chances  of  an  individual  raising 
himself  out  of  his  class  go  on  diminishing. 

And  while  they  build  castles  in  Spain,  capital 
crushes  them,  as  it  has  crushed  the  small  mer- 
chants and  the  small  manufacturers,  who 
thought  they,  too,  with  free  credit  and  a  little 
luck,  might  become  first-class  capitalists,  whose 
names  should  be  written  in  the  Great  Book  of 
the  Public  Debt. 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  93 

The  intellectuals,  in  all  that  has  to  do  with 
the  understanding  of  the  social  movement,  do 
not  rise  above  the  intellectual  level  of  those  little 
bourgeois  who  scoffed  so  fiercely  at  the  bunglers 
of  1830  and  who,  after  being  ruined  and  merged 
in  the  proletariat,  none  the  less  continue  to  de- 
test socialism ;  to  such  a  degree  were  their  heads 
perverted  by  the  religion  of  property.  The  in- 
tellectuals, whose  brains  are  stuffed  with  all  the 
prejudices  of  the  bourgeois  class,  are  inferior  to 
those  little  bourgeois  of  1830  and  1848  who  at 
least  were  not  afraid  of  gunpowder;  they  have 
not  their  spirit  of  combativeness,  they  are  true 
imbeciles,  —  if  we  restore  to  this  word  its  orig- 
inal Latin  meaning  of  unsuited  for  war.  With- 
out resistance  they  endure  rebuffs  and  wrongs 
and  they  do  not  think  of  uniting,  of  organizing 
themselves  to  defend  their  interests  and  give  bat- 
tle to  capital  on  the  economic  field. 

The  intellectual  proletariat  as  we  know  it  is  a 
recent  growth,  it  has  especially  developed  in  the 
last  forty  years.  When  after  the  amnesty  of 
the  condemned  of  the  Commune,  we  began  again 
the  socialist  propaganda,  believing  that  it  would 
be  easy  to  draw  the  intellectuals  into  the  move- 
ment we  took  up  our  dwelling  in  their  cultured 
Latin  quarter,  Guesde  taking  up  his  residence  in 
the  Rue  de  la  Pitie,  Vaillant  in  the  Rue  Monge 


94  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

and  I  in  the  Boulevard  de  Port  Royal.  We  be- 
came acquainted  with  hundreds  of  young  men, 
students  of  law,  of  medicines,  of  the  sciences, 
but  you  can  count  on  your  fingers  those  whom 
we  brought  into  the  socialist  camp.  Our  ideas  at- 
tracted them  one  day,  but  the  next  day  the  wind 
blew  from  another  quarter  and  turned  their 
heads. 

An  honorable  merchant  of  Bordeaux,  a  promi- 
nent member  of  the  municipal  council,  said  in 
the  time  of  the  empire  to  my  father,  who  was 
disturbed  over  my  socialism : 

"Friend  Lafargue,  you  must  let  youth  take  its 
course ;  I  was  a  socialist  when  I  studied  at  Paris, 
I  was  connected  with  the  secret  societies  and  I 
took  part  in  the  movement  for  demanding  of 
Louis  Philippe  the  pardon  of  Barbes."  The 
young  men  of  our  age  turn  quickly,  let  them  get 
back  to  their  homes  and  they  develop  prominent 
abdomens  and  become  reactionaries. 

We  welcomed  joyfully  the  entrance  of  Jaures 
into  socialism ;  we  thought  that  the  new  form 
which  he  brought  to  our  propaganda  w'ould 
make  it  penetrate  into  circles  that  we  had  not 
been  able  to  touch.  He  has  in  fact  made  a  de- 
cided impression  on  the  university  circle,  and  we 
owe  it  in  part  to  him  that  the  nurslings  of  the 
Ecole  Normale  have  ideas  regarding  the  social 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  95 

movement  which  are  a  little  less  absurd  and 
formless  than  those  with  which  their  learning 
and  intelligence  have  hitherto  been  contented. 
Lately,  joining  forces  with  the  radicai  politicians 
who  had  lost  their  working-class  following,  they 
have  invaded  the  socialist  party.  Their  souls 
overflow  with  the  purest  intentions;  if  their 
peaceful  habits  prevent  them  from  throwing 
themselves  into  the  conflict,  and  if  their  lofty 
culture  forbids  them  to  take  their  place  in  the 
ranks  of  the  comrades,  they  nevertheless  con- 
descend to  instruct  us  in  ethics,  to  polish  off  our 
ignorance,  to  teach  us  how  to  think,  to  offer  us 
such  crumbs  of  science  as  we  may  be  able  to  di- 
gest, and  to  direct  us ;  they  modestly  offer  them- 
selves to  us  as  leaders  and  schoolmasters. 

These  intellectuals  who  have  spent  their  youth 
in  the  university  that  they  might  become  experts 
on  exercises,  polishers  of  phrases,  philosophers 
or  doctors,  imagine  one  can  improvise  himself  in- 
to a  master  of  the  socialist  theory  by  attending  a 
single  lecture  or  by  the  careless  reading  of  a  sin- 
gle pamphlet.  Naturalists  who  had  felt  the  need 
of  painful  research  to  learn  the  habits  of  mol- 
lusks  or  of  the  polyps  who  live  in  a  community 
on  the  coral  banks,  think  that  they  know  enough 
to  regulate  human  societies,  and  that  by  keep- 
ing their  stand  on  the  first  steps  of  the  ascending 


96  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

ladder  of  animal  life  they  can  the  better  discern 
the  human  ideal.  The  philosophers,  the  moral- 
ists, the  historians  and  the  politicians  have  aims 
equally  lofty ;  they  bring'  an  abundant  supply  of 
ideas  and  a  new  method  of  action  to  replace  the 
imperfect  theory  and  tactics  which  in  all  capital- 
ist countries  have  served  to  build  up  socialist 
parties  strong  in  numbers,  unity  and  discipline. 

The  class  struggle  is  out  of  fashion,  declare 
these  professors  of  socialism.  Can  a  line  of  de- 
marcation be  drawn  between  classes?  Do  not 
the  working  people  have  savings  bank  accounts 
of  $20,  $40  and  $100,  bringing  them  50  cents, 
$1.50  and  $3.00  of  interest  yearly?  Is  it  not  true 
that  the  directors  and  managers  of  mines,  rail- 
roads and  financial  houses  are  wage-workers, 
having  their  functions  and  duties  in  the  enter- 
prises which  they  manage  for  the  account  of  cap- 
italists? The  argument  is  unanswerable,  but  by 
the  same  token  there  is  no  vegetable  kingdom 
nor  animal  kingdom  because  we  can  not  sepa- 
rate them  "with  an  ax,"  as  it  were,  for  the  rea- 
son that  at  their  points  of  contact,  vegetables  and 
animals  merge  into  each  other.  There  is  no 
longer  any  day  or  any  night  because  the  sun 
does  not  appear  on  the  horizon  at  the  same  mo- 
ment all  over  the  earth,  and  because  it  is  day  at 
the  antipodes  while  it  is  night  here. 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  97 

The  concentration  of  capital?  A  worn-out 
tune  of  1850.  The  corporations  by  their  stocks 
and  bonds  parcel  out  property  and  distribute  it 
among-  all  the  citizens.  How  blinded  we  were 
by  our  sectarianism  when  we  thought  that  this 
new  form  of  property,  essentially  capitalistic, 
was  enabling-  the  financiers  to  plunge  their  thiev- 
ing hands  into  the  smallest  purses,  to  extract  the 
last  pieces  of  silver. 

The  poverty  of  the  working  class !  But  it  is 
diminishing  and  soon  will  disappear  through  the 
constant  increase  of  wages,  while  interest  on 
money  is  constantly  diminishing;  some  fine  day 
it  will  descend  to  zero  and  the  bourgeois  will  be 
overjoyed  to  offer  their  beloved  capital  on  the 
altar  of  socialism.  That  to-morrow  or  the  day 
after  the  capitalist  will  be  forced  to  work,  is  the 
prediction  of  Mr.  Waldeck-Rousseau.  And 
there  are  intellectuals  whose  condition  grows 
worse  in  proportion  as  capitalism  develops,  who 
are  stultified  by  the  utterances  of  the  employers 
to  a  point  where  they  affirm  that  the  position  of 
wage-workers  is  improving,  and  there  are  intel- 
lectuals who  assume  to  possess  some  knowledge 
of  political  economy,  who  affirm  that  interest  on 
money  is  rapidly  diminishing.  Could  these  re- 
formers of  socialism  perchance  be  ignorant  that 
Adam  Smith  calculated  at  the  end  of  the  eigh- 


98  SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

teenth  century  that  3  per  cent  was  the  normal 
interest  of  capital  running  no  risk,  and  that  the 
financiers  of  our  own  epoch  consider  that  it  is 
still  around  3  per  cent  that  the  interest  rate 
must  fluctuate.  If  a  few  years  ago  this  rate 
seemed  to  fall  below  2^  per  cent,  it  has  risen  to- 
day above  3  per  cent.  Capital  is  merchandise, 
like  intellectual  capacities  and  carrots ;  as  such 
it  is  subject  to  the  fluctuations  of  supply  and  de- 
mand. It  was  then  more  offered  than  demanded, 
whereas  since  the  development  of  the  industrial 
plant  of  Russia,  since  the  opening  of  China  to 
European  exploitation,  etc.,  the  over-supply  of 
capital  has  been  absorbed  and  its  price  rises  with 
its  scarcity.  But  the  intellectuals  have  too  many 
trifles  to  think  of  and  too  many  harmonious 
phrases  to  construct  for  giving  any  thought  to 
economic  phenomena.  They  take  for  sterling 
truths  all  the  lies  of  the  capitalists,  and  repeat 
with  pious  conviction  the  old  litanies  of  the  orth- 
odox economic  church :  "There  are  no  classes, 
wealth  is  coming  to  be  distributed  more  and 
more  equitably,  the  workers  are  growing  richer 
and  those  living  on  incomes  are  growing  poorer, 
and  the  capitalist  society  is  the  best  of  all  possi- 
ble societies ;  these  truths  shine  forth  like  suns 
and  none  but  partisans  and  mystics  can  deny 
them." 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS  99 

These  intellectuals  propose  to  modify  the 
tactics  as  well  as  the  theories  of  the  socialist 
party ;  they  wish  to  impose  upon  it  a  new  method 
of  action.  It  must  no  longer  strive  to  conquer 
the  public  powers  by  a  great  struggle,  legal  or 
revolutionary  as  need  may  be,  but  let  itself  be 
conquered  by  every  ministry  of  a  republican  co- 
alition ;  it  is  no  longer  to  oppose  the  socialist 
party  to  all  the  bourgeois  parties ;  what  is  needed 
is  to  put  it  at  the  service  of  the  liberal  party ;  we 
must  no  longer  organize  it  for  the  class  strug- 
gle, but  keep  it  ready  for  all  the  compromises  of 
politicians.  And  to  further  the  triumph  of  the 
new  method  of  action,  they  propose  to  disorgan- 
ize the  socialist  party,  to  break  up  its  old  systems 
and  to  demolish  the  organizations  which  for 
twenty  years  have  labored  to  give  the  workers  a 
sense  of  their  class  interests  and  to  group  them 
in  a  party  of  economic  and  political  struggle. 

But  the  intellectuals  will  lose  their  labors ; 
thus  far  they  have  only  succeeded  in  drawing 
closer  the  ties  uniting  the  socialists  of  the  differ- 
ent organizations,  and  in  making  themselves 
ridiculous. 

The  intellectuals  ought  to  have  been  the  first 
of  all  the  various  groups  to  revolt  against  cap- 
italist society,  in  which  they  occupy  a  subordi- 
nate position  so  little  in  keeping  with  their  hopes 


100         SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

and  their  talents,  but  they  do  not  even  under- 
stand it;  they  have  such  a  confused  idea  of  it 
that  Auguste  Comte,  Renan,  and  others  more  or 
less  distinguished  have  cherished  the  dream  of 
reviving  for  their  benefit  an  aristocracy  copied 
after  the  model  of  the  Chinese  mandarin  system. 
Such  an  idea  is  a  reflection  of  past  ages  in  their 
heads,  for  nothing  is  in  more  absolute  opposition 
with  the  modern  social  movement  than  such  pre- 
tensions. The  intellectuals  in  previous  states  of 
society  formed  a  world  outside  and  above  that  of 
production,  having  charge  only  of  education,  of 
the  direction  of  religious  worship,  and  of  the 
political  administration. 

The  mechanic  industry  of  these  societies  com- 
bine in  the  same  producer,  manual  labor  and  in- 
tellectual labor ;  it  was  for  example  the  same 
cabinetmaker  who  designed  and  executed  the 
piece  of  furniture,  who  bought  its  first  material 
and  who  even  undertook  its  sale.  Capitalist  pro- 
duction has  divorced  two  functions  which  once 
were  indissolubly  united ;  on  the  one  side  it  puts 
the  manual  workers,  who  become  more  and  more 
servants  of  the  machine,  and  on  the  other  the 
intellectual  workers,  engineers,  chemists,  man- 
agers, etc.  But  these  two  categories  of  workers, 
however  different  and  contrary  they  may  be  in 
their  education  and  habits,  are  welded  together, 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS         lOl 

to  the  point  that  a  capitaHst  industry  can  not  be 
carried  on  without  manual  laborers  any  more 
than  without  intellectual  wage-workers. 

United  in  production,  united  under  the  yoke  of 
capitalist  exploitation,  united  they  should  be  also 
in  revolt  against  the  common  enemy.  The  intel- 
lectuals, if  they  understood  their  own  real  inter- 
ests would  come  in  crowds  to  socialism,  not 
through  philanthropy,  not  through  pity  for  the 
miseries  of  the  workers,  not  through  affectation 
and  snobbery,  but  to  save  themselves,  to  assure 
the  future  welfare  of  their  wives  and  children, 
to  fulfill  their  duty  to  their  class.  They  ought 
to  be  ashamed  of  being  left  behind  in  the  social 
battle  by  their  comrades  in  the  manual  category. 
They  have  many  things  to  teach  them,  but  they 
have  still  much  to  learn  from  them ;  the  work- 
ingmen  have  a  practical  sense  superior  to  theirs, 
and  have  given  proof  of  an  instinctive  intuition 
of  the  communist  tendencies  of  modern  capital- 
ism which  is  lacking  to  the  intellectuals,  who 
have  only  been  able  by  a  conscious  mental  effort 
to  arrive,  at  this  conception.  If  only  they  had 
understood  their  own  interests,  they  would  long 
since  have  turned  against  the  capitalist  class  the 
education  which  it  has  generously  distributed  in 
order  better  to  exploit  them ;  they  would  have 
utilized  their  intellectual    capacities,    which    are 


102         SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

enriching  their  masters,  as  so  many  improved 
weapons  to  fight  capitaHsm  and  to  conquer  the 
freedom  of  their  class,  the  wage-working  class. 

Capitalist  production,  which  has  overthrown 
the  old  conditions  of  life  and  of  work,  has  elab- 
orated new  forms,  which  already  can  be  dis- 
cerned without  supernatural  vision,  but  which  to 
the  intellectuals  remain  sealed  under  seven  seals. 
One  of  the  leading  lights  of  intellectualism,  M. 
Durkheim,  in  his  book,  "The  Division  of  Labor," 
which  made  some  noise  in  university  circles,  can 
not  conceive  of  society  except  on  the  social  pat- 
tern of  ancient  Egypt,  each  laborer  remaining, 
his  life  through,  penned  up  in  one  single  trade. 
However,  unless  one  is  so  unfortunate  as  to  be 
affected  by  the  hopeless  near-sightedness  of  the 
Ecole  Normale,  one  can  not  help  seeing  that  the 
machine  is  suppressing  trades,  one  after  the 
other,  in  a  way  to  let  only  one  survive,  that  of 
the  machinist,  and  that  when  it  has  finished  its 
revolutionary  work  which  the  socialists  will  com- 
plete by  revolutionizing  capitalist  society,  the 
producer  of  the  communist  society  will  plow  and 
sow  with  the  machine  to-day,  will  spin,  will  turn 
wood  or  polish  steel  to-morrow,  and  will  exercise 
in  turn  all  the  trades  to  the  greater  profit  of  his 
health   and   his   intelligence. 

The     industrial     applications     of    mechanics, 


SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS         103 

chemistry  and  physics,  which,  monopolized  by 
capital,  oppress  the  worker,  will,  when  they  shall 
be  common  property,  emancipate  man  from  toil 
and  give  him  leisure  and  liberty. 

Mechanical  production,  which  under  capitalist 
direction  can  only  buffet  the  worker  back  and 
forth  from  periods  of  over-work  to  periods  of 
enforced  idleness,  will  when  developed  and  reg- 
ulated by  a  communist  administration,  require 
from  the  producer,  to  provide  for  the  normal 
needs  of  society,  only  a  maximum  day  of  two  or 
three  hours  in  the  workshop,  and  when  this  time 
of  necessary  social  labor  is  fulfilled  he  will  be 
able  to  enjoy  freely  the  physical  and  intellectual 
pleasures  of  life. 

The  artist  then  will  paint,  will  sing,  will  dance, 
the  writer  will  write,  the  musician  will  compose 
operas,  the  philosopher  will  build  systems,  the 
chemist  will  analyze  substances  not  to  gain 
money,  to  receive  a  salary,  but  to  deserve  ap- 
plause, to  win  laurel  wreaths,  like  the  conquerors 
at  the  Olympic  games,  but  to  satisfy  their  ar- 
tistic and  scientific  passion ;  for  one  does  not 
drink  a  glass  of  champagne  or  kiss  the  woman 
he  loves  for  the  benefit  of  the  gallery.  The  artist 
and  the  scientist  may  then  repeat  the  enthusiastic 
words  of  Kepler,  that  hero  of  science :  "The 
elector  of  Saxonv  with  all  his  wealth  can  not 


104         SOCIALISM  AND  THE  INTELLECTUALS 

equal  the  pleasure  I  have  felt  in  composing  the 
Mysterium  Cosmographicum." 

Will  not  the  intellectuals  end  by  hearing  the 
voice  of  the  socialist  calling  them  to  the  rescue, 
to  emancipate  science  and  art  from  the  capitalist 
yoke,  to  liberate  thought  from  the  slavery  of 
commercialism  ? 


THE 
BANKRUPTCY  OF  CAPITALISM 

The  nineteenth  century  was  the  century  of 
capitalism.  Capitalism  filled  that  century  to 
overflowing  with  its  commerce,  its  industry,  its 
manners,  its  fashions,  its  literature,  its  art,  its 
science,  its  philosophy,  its  religion,  its  politics 
and  its  civil  code,  more  universal  than  the  laws 
imposed  by  Rome  upon  the  nations  of  the  ancient 
world.  The  capitalist  movement,  starting  from 
England,  the  United  States  and  France,  has 
shaken  the  foundations  of  Europe  and  of  the 
world.  It  has  forced  the  old  feudal  monarchies 
of  Austria  and  Germany  and  the  barbaric  despot- 
ism of  Russia  to  put  themselves  in  line ;  and  in 
these  last  days  it  has  gone  into  the  extreme  East, 
into  Japan,  where  it  has  overthrown  the  feudal 
system  and  implanted  the  industry  and  the  poli- 
tics of  capitalism. 

Capitalism  has  taken  possession  of  our  planet; 

105 


106  THE  BANKRUPTCY  OF   CAPITALISM 

its  fleets  bring  together  the  continents  which 
oceans  had  separated ;  its  railroads,  spanning 
mountains  and  deserts,  furrow  the  earth ;  the 
electric  wires,  the  nervous  system  of  the  globe, 
bind  all  nations  together,  and  their  palpitations 
reverberate  in  the  great  centers  of  population. 
Now  for  the  first  time  there  is  a  contemporary 
history  of  the  world.  Events  in  Australia,  the 
Transvaal,  China,  are  known  in  London,  Paris, 
New  York,  at  the  moment  they  are  brought 
about,  precisely  as  if  they  happened  in  the  out- 
skirts of  the  city  where  the  news  is  published. 

Civilized  nations  live  off  the  products  of  the 
whole  earth.  Egypt,  India,  Louisiana,  furnish 
the  cotton,  Australia  the  wool,  Japan  the  silk, 
China  the  tea,  Brazil  the  coffee.  New  Zealand 
and  the  United  States  the  meat  and  grain.  The 
capitalist  carries  in  his  stomach  and  on  his  back 
the  spoils  of  the  universe. 

The  study  of  natural  phenomena  has  under- 
gone an  unprecedented,  an  unheard-of,  develop- 
ment. New  sciences,  geology,  chemistry,  physics, 
etc.,  have  arisen.  The  industrial  application  of 
the  forces  of  nature  and  of  the  discoveries  of 
science  has  taken  on  a  still  more  startling  devel- 
opment; some  of  the  geometrical  discoveries  of 
the  scientists  of  Alexandria,  two  thousand  years 
old,  have  for  the  first  time  been  utilized. 


THE  BANKRUPTCY  OF  CAPITALISM  107 

The  production  of  machine  industry  can  pro- 
vide for  all  demand  and  more.  The  mechanical 
application  of  the  forces  of  nature  has  increased 
man's  productive  forces  tenfold,  a  hundredfold. 
A  few  hours'  daily  labor,  furnished  by  the  able- 
bodied  members  of  the  nation,  would  produce 
enough  to  satisfy  the  material  and  intellectual 
needs  of  all. 

But  what  has  come  of  the  colossal  and  won- 
derful development  of  science,  industry  and 
commerce  in  the  nineteenth  century?  Has  it 
made  humanity  stronger,  healthier,  haopier?  Has 
it  given  leisure  to  the  producers  ?  Has  it  brought 
comfort  and  contentment  to  the  people? 

Never  has  work  been  so  prolonged,  so  ex- 
hausting, so  injurious  to  man's  body  and  so  fatal 
to  his  intelligence.  Never  has  the  industrial  la- 
bor which  undermines  health,  shortens  life  and 
starves  the  intellect  been  so  general,  been  im- 
posed on  such  ever-growing  masses  of  laborers. 
The  men,  women  and  children  of  the  proletariat 
are  bent  under  the  iron  yoke  of  machine  indus- 
try. Poverty  is  their  reward  when  they  work, 
starvation  when  they  lose  their  jobs. 

In  former  stages  of  society,  famine  appeared 
only  when  the  earth  refused  her  harvests.  In 
capitalist  society,  famine  sits  at  the  hearth  of  the 
working  class  when  granaries  and  cellars  burst 


108  THE  BANKRUPTCY   OF  CAPITAUSM 

with  the  fruits  of  the  earth,  and  when  the  mar- 
ket is  gorged  with  the  products  of  industry. 

All  the  toil,  all  the  production,  all  the  suffer- 
ing of  the  working  class  has  but  served  to 
heighten  its  physical  and  mental  destitution,  to 
drag  it  down  from  poverty  into  wretchedness. 

Capitalism,  controlling  the  means  of  produc- 
tion and  directing  the  social  and  political  life  of 
a  century  of  science  and  industry,  has  become 
bankrupt.  The  capitalists  have  not  even  proved 
competent,  like  the  owners  of  chattel  slaves,  to 
guarantee  to  their  toilers  the  work  to  provide 
their  miserable  livelihood ;  capitalism  massacred 
them  when  they  dared  demand  the  right  to  work 
— a  slave's  right.* 

The  capitalist  class  has  also  made  a  failure  of 
itself.  It  has  seized  upon  the  social  wealth  to 
enjoy  it,  and  never  was  the  ruling  class  more  in- 
capable of  enjoyment.  The  newly  rich,  those 
who  have  built  up  their  fortunes  by  accumulat- 
ing the  filchings  from  labor,  live  like  strangers 
in  the  midst  of  luxury  and  artistic  treasures,  with 
which  they  surround  themselves  through  a  fool- 
ish vanity,  to  pay  homage  to  their  millions. 

The  leading  capitalists,    the  millionaires  and 


*  I  aUude  to  tho  Days  of  June,  1848,  The  insurgents 
demanded   the    "Right   to   Work." 


THE  BANKRUPTCY  OF   CAPITALISM  109 

billionaires,  are  sad  specimens  of  the  human  race, 
useless  and  hurtful.  The  mark  of  degeneracy 
is  upon  them.  Their  sickly  offspring  are  old  at 
birth.  Their  organs  are  sapped  with  diseases. 
Exquisite  meats  and  wines  load  down  their  ta- 
bles, but  the  stomach  refuses  to  digest  them; 
women  expert  in  love  perfume  their  couches 
with  youth  and  beauty,  but  their  senses  are  be- 
numbed. They  own  palatial  dwellings  in  en- 
chanting sites,  and  they  have  no  eyes,  no  feeling 
for  joyful  nature,  with  its  eternal  youth  and 
change.  Sated  and  disgusted  with  everything, 
they  are  followed  everywhere  by  ennui  as  by 
their  shadows.  They  yawn  at  rising  and  when 
they  go  to  bed ;  they  yawn  at  their  fests  and  at 
their  orgies.  They  began  yawning  in  their 
mother's  womb. 

The  pessimism  which,  in  the  wake  of  capital- 
ist property,  made  its  appearance  in  ancient 
Greece  six  centuries  before  Jesus  Christ,  and 
which  has  since  formed  the  foundation  of  the 
moral  and  religious  philosophy  of  the  capitalist 
class,  became  the  leading  characteristic  of  the 
philosophy  of  the  second  half  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  The  pessimism  of  Theognis  sprang 
from  the  uncertainties  and  vicissitudes  of  life  in 
the  Greek  cities,  torn  by  the  perpetual  wars  be- 
tween rich  and  poor;  the  pessimism  of  the  capit- 


110  THE  BANKRUPTCY  OF  CAPITALISM 

alist  is  the  bitter  fruit  of  satiety,  ennui  and  the 
impoverishment  of  the  blood. 

The  capitalist  class  is  falling  into  its  second 
childhood;  its  decreptitude  appears  in  its  litera- 
ture, now  returning  to  its  starting  point.  Ro- 
mantic literature,  the  literary  form  proper  to  the 
capitalist  class,  which  started  out  with  the  ro- 
mantic Christianity  of  Chateaubriand,  is  return- 
ing to  the  same  point,  after  passing  through  the 
historical  novel  and  the  character  novel.  (Wit- 
ness in  this  country  the  immense  sale  of  "Ben 
Hur"  and  its  imitators. — Translator.)  Capital- 
ism, which  in  its  virile  and  combative  youth  in 
the  eighteenth  century  had  wished  to  emancipate 
itself  from  Christianity,  resigns  itself  in  its  old 
age  to  practices  of  the  grossest  superstition. 

The  capitalist  class,  bankrupt,  old,  useless  and 
hurtful,  has  finished  its  historic  mission ;  it  per- 
sists as  ruling  class  only  through  its  acquired 
momentum.  The  proletariat  of  the  twentieth 
century  will  execute  the  decree  of  history ;  will 
drive  it  from  its  position  of  social  control.  Then 
the  stupendous  work  in  science  and  industry  ac- 
complished by  civilized  humanity,  at  the  price  of 
such  toil  and  suffering,  will  engender  peace  and 
happiness;  then  will  this  vale  of  tears  be  trans- 
formed into  an  earthly  paradise. 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

The  bourgeois  has  thought  and  still  thinks  that 
woman  ought  to  remain  at  home  and  devote  her 
activity  to  supervising  and  directing  the  house- 
keeping, caring  for  her  husband,  and  manufac- 
turing and  nourishing  children.  Even  Xeno- 
phon,  at  the  time  when  the  bourgeoisie  was  newly 
born  and  was  taking  its  shape  in  ancient  society, 
traced  the  main  outlines  of  this  ideal  of  woman. 
But  if  through  the  course  of  centuries,  this  ideal 
may  have  appeared  reasonable,  because  it  cor- 
responded to  economic  conditions  which  pre- 
vailed, it  is  no  longer  anything  more  than  an 
ideological  survival,  since  these  conditions  have 
ceased  to  exist. 

The  domestication  of  woman  presupposes  that 
she  fulfills  in  the  household  certain  numerous 
functions  which  absorb  all  her  energy ;  now,  the 
most  important  and  the  most  exacting  of  these 
domestic  labors, — the  spinning  of  wool  and  linen, 
the  cutting  and  making  up  of  clothing,  laundry 


132  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

work,  baking,  etc., — are  carried  on  by  capitalistic 

industry.  It  furthermore  presupposes  that  man 
by  his  contribution  to  the  family  capital  and  his 
earnings  provides  for  the  material  needs  of  the 
family ;  now,  among  the  comfortable  bourgeoisie, 
marriage  is  as  much  an  association  of  capitals*  as 
a  union  of  persons  and  often  the  capital  contrib- 
uted by  the  wife  exceeds  that  of  the  husband,  and 
in  the  small  bourgeoisie  the  gains  of  the  father 
of  the  family  have  fallen  so  low  that  the  children, 
— ^girls  as  well  as  boys, — are  compelled  to  earn 
their  living  in  business,  railroad  offices,  banks, 

*  The  dowry  has  played  an  important  role  in  the 
history  of  woman:  at  the  beginning  of  the  patriarchal 
period  the  husband  buys  her  from  her  father,  who 
has  to  refund  her  purchase  price  if  for  any  cause 
whatever  he  repudiates  her  and  sends  her  back  to  her 
family;  later  this  purchase  price  is  returned  to  him 
and  constitutes  her  dowry,  which  her  relatives  are 
accustomed  to  double.  From  the  moment  when  the 
wife  enters  into  her  husband's  house  with  a  dowry, 
she  ceases  to  be  a  slave  whom  he  may  dismiss,  sell 
and  kill.  The  dowry,  which  in  Rome  and  Athens  became 
a  legal  charge  upon  the  property  of  the  husband,  w^as, 
in  case  of  her  repudiation  or  divorce,  to  be  restored  to 
her  in  preference  to  any  creditor.  "No  pleasure  is 
derived  from  the  riches  which  a  woman  brings  into  the 
household,"  says  a  fragment  of  Euripides,  "they  only 
serve  to  render  divorce  difficult."  The  comic  authors 
ridiculed  the  husbands,  who  in  fear  of  a  suit  over  the 
dowry,  fell  into  dependence  upon  the  wife.  A  character 
in  Plautus  says  to  a  husband  who  is  talking  against 
his  wife,  "You  accepted  the  money  of  her  dowry,  you 
sold  your  authority— imperium."  The  wealthy  Roman 
matrons  carried  their  insolence  to  such  a  point  that 
they  did  not  trust  the  management  of  their  dowry  to 
their  husbands,  they  gave  it  over  to  the  stewards,  who 
sometimes  fulfilled  with  them  another  service,  as  the 
evil-speaking    Martial    states. 

Adultery  on  the  part  of  the  wife  involved  a  legal 
divorce  and  the  restitution  of  the  dowry,  but  rather 
than    come   to   this    painful    extremity,    the    husbands 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION  113 

teaching,  civil  service  positions,  etc.,  while  it 
often  happens  that  the  young  wife  continues  to 
work  outside  in  order  to  help  out  the  resources 
of  the  housekeeping,  when  the  earnings  of  the 
husband  do  not  suffice  to  cover  the  expenses. 

The  daughters  and  wives  of  the  small  bour- 
geoisie, as  well  as  those  of  the  working  class, 
thus  enter  into  competition  with  their  father, 
brothers  and  husband.  This  economic  antagon- 
ism, which  the  bourgeoisie  had  prevented  from 
developing  by  confining  the  wife  to  the  family 
dwelling,  is  becoming  general  and  is  intensified 
in  proportion  as  capitalistic  production  develops ; 
it  invades  the  fields  of  the   liberal  professions — 


preferred  to  close  their  eyes  to  the  foibles  of  their 
wives;  at  Rome  and  at  Athens  the  law  had  to  strike 
at  them  in  order  to  recall  them  to  their  marital  dig- 
nity; in  China  a  certain  number  of  bamboo  strokes 
were  applied  to  the  soles  of  their  feet.  The  penalties 
not  being  sufficient  to  encourage  the  husbands  to  re- 
pudiate their  adulterous  w^ives,  the  law,  in  order  to  prop 
up  masculine  virtue,  permitted  those  who  denounced 
the  infidelity  of  the  wife  to  retain  a  part  of  the  dowry; 
there  were  then  men  who  married  only  in  prospect  of 
the  adultery  of  the  wife.  The  Roman  women  evaded 
the  law  by  having  themselves  enrolled  in  the  censor's 
book  on  the  list  of  prostitutes,  to  whom  it  did  not 
apply.  The  number  of  matrons  inscribed  became  so 
considerable  that  the  Senate,  under  Tiberius  passed  a 
decree  forbidding  "women  who  had  a  patrician  for  a 
grandfather,  husband  or  father  to  traffic  in  their 
bodies."  (Tacitus.  Annals  II.,  85.)  Adultery  on  the 
part  of  the  wife  in  the  patrician  society  of  antiquity, 
as  well  as  in  the  aristocratic  society  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  had  become  so  general  that  it  had  so  to  speak 
entered  into  the  social  customs.  It  was  looked  upon 
lightly  as  a  corrective  and  accompaniment  of  mar- 
riage. 


114  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

medicine,  law,  literature,  journalism,  the  sci- 
ences, etc., — where  man  had  reserved  for  him- 
self a  monopoly,  which  he  imagined  was  to  be 
eternal.  The  laborers,  as  is  always  the  case, 
have  been  the  first  to  draw  the  logical  conse- 
quences of  the  participation  of  woman  in  social 
production ;  they  have  replaced  the  ideal  of  the 
artisan, — the  wife  who  is  nothing  but  a  house- 
keeper,— by  a  new  ideal, — woman  as  a  compan- 
ion in  their  economic  and  political  struggles  for 
the  raising  of  wages  and  the  emancipation  of 
labor. 

The  bourgeois  has  not  yet  succeeded  in  under- 
standing that  his  ideal  is  already  long  since  out 
of  date  and  that  it  must  be  remodeled  to  corres- 
pond to  the  new  conditions  of  the  social  environ- 
ment ;  nevertheless  since  the  first  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth century  the  ladies  of  the  bourgeoisie  have 
begun  to  protest  against  their  inferior  position 
in  the  family,  so  much  the  more  intolerable  in 
that  their  dowry  placed  them  on  a  footing  of 
equality  with  the  husband ;  they  rebelled  against 
the  domestic  slavery  and  the  parsimonious  life 
to  which  they  were  condemned,  as  well  as  the  dep- 
rivation of  intellectual  and  material  enjoyments 
which  was  imposed  upon  them ;  the  bolder  ones 
went  so  far  as  to  demand  free  love  and  to  ally 
themselves  with  the  Utopian  sects  which  oreached 


THE  WOMAN  v^UESTION  115 

the  emancipation  of  woman.*  The  philosophers 
and  the  morahsts  had  the  simpHcity  to  beheve 
that  they  would  stop  the  woman  movement  by 
opposing-  to  it  the  sacred  interest  of  the  family, 
which  they  declared  could  not  survive  without 
the  subjection  of  woman  to  the  labors  of  the 
household,  the  sewing  on  of  shirt  buttons,  the 
mending  of  hose,  etc.,  her  duty  was  to  devote 
herself  to  these  obscure  and  thankless  labors,  in 
order  that  man  might  freely  unfold  and  display 
his  brilliant  and  superior  faculties.  These  same 
philosophers,  who  lectured  the  rebellious  ladies 
on  the  cult  of  the  family,  sang  the  praises  of 
capitalist  industry,  which,  by  forcing  the  wife 
away  from  the  domestic  hearth  and  her  child's 
cradle  to  condemn  her  to  the  forced  labor  of  the 
factory,  destroys  the  working-class  family. 

The  bourgeois  ladies  laughed  at  the  sermons, 
equally  imbecile  and  ethical,  of  these  solemn  phi- 
losophers ;  they  kept  on  their  way  and  attained 
the  end  they  set  for  themselves ;  like  the  patri- 
cian lady  of  ancient  Rome  and  the  countess  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  they  threw  off  the  cares 
of  housekeeping  and  of  the  nursing  of  the  child 

*  The  Saint  Simon  manifesto  of  1830  announced  that 
the  religion  of  Saint  Simon  had  come  "to  put  an  end 
to  that  shameful  traffic,  that  legal  prostitution,  which 
under  the  name  of  marriage  often  blesses  the  mon- 
strous union  of  self-surrender  and  egoism,  of  light  and 
of  ignorance,  of  youth  and  decrepitude." 


116  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

upon  mercenaries,  that  they  might  devote  them- 
selves wholly  to  the  toilet,  that  they  might  be 
the  most  luxuriously  arrayed  dolls  in  the  capital- 
ist world  and  in  order  to  make  business  move. 
The  daughters  and  wives  of  American  plutocracy 
have  attained  the  extreme  limits  of  this  sort  of 
emancipation ;  they  are  transforming  their  fathers 
and  husbands  into  accumulators  of  millions, 
which  they  squander  madly.  Since  the  toilet  does 
not  exhaust  the  entire  activity  of  the  ladies  of 
capitalism,  they  find  amusement  in  breaking  the 
marriage  contract  in  order  to  assert  their  inde- 
pendence and  improve  the  race.  The  Communist 
Manifesto  remarks  that  the  innumerable  divorce 
suits  in  which  adultery  is  alleged  are  indisputa- 
ble proofs  of  the  respect  inspired  in  the  bourgeois 
of  both  sexes  by  the  sacred  bonds  of  marriage 
which  the  "licentious  socialists"  talk  of  loosen- 
ing. 

When  the  daughters  and  wives  of  the  small 
bourgeoisie,  obliged  to  earn  their  living  and  to 
increase  the  resources  of  the  family,  began  to 
invade  the  stores,  the  offices,  the  civil  service  and 
the  liberal  professions,  the  bourgeois  were  seized 
with  anxiety  for  their  means  of  existence  already 
so  reduced ;  feminine  competition  would  reduce 
them  still  further.  The  intellectuals  who  took 
up  the  defense  of  the  males,  thought  it  prudent 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION  117 

not  to  Start  afresh  with  the  ethical  sermons  which 
had  miscarried  so  piteously  in  the  case  ot  the 
wealthy  bourgeois  ladies; — they  appealed  to  sci- 
ence ;  they  demonstrated  by  reasons  which  were 
irrefutable  and  loftily  scientific  that  woman  can- 
not emerge  from  the  occupations  of  housekeep- 
ing without  violating  the  laws  of  nature  and  his- 
tory. They  proved  to  their  complete  satisfaction 
that  woman  is  an  inferior  being,  incapable  of  re- 
ceiving a  higher  intellectual  education  and  of 
furnishing  the  combination  of  attention,  energy 
and  agility  demanded  by  the  professions  in  which 
she  was  entering  into  competition  with  man.  Her 
brain,  less  voluminous,  less  heavy  and  less  com- 
plex than  that  of  man,  is  a  "child's  brain."  Her 
less  developed  muscles  have  not  the  strength  for 
attack  and  for  resistance;  the  bones  of  her  fore- 
arm, her  pelvis,  her  femur,  and  in  fact  all  her 
osseous,  muscular  and  nervous  system  do  not 
permit  her  to  undertake  more  than  the  routine 
of  the  household.  Nature  designed  her  in  all 
her  organization  to  be  the  servant  of  man,  just 
as  the  odious  god  of  the  Jews  and  Christians 
marked  out  the  race  of  Ham  for  slavery. 

History  contributed  its  startling  confirmation 
of  these  ultra  scientific  truths;  the  philosophers 
and  the  historians  affirmed  that  always  and 
everywhere  the  wife,  subordinate  to  the  man,  had 


118  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

been  shut  up  in  the  house,  in  the  woman's  apart- 
ments; if  such  had  been  her  lot  in  the  past, 
such  was  to  be  her  destiny  in  the  future, 
was  the  positive  declaration  of  Auguste 
Comte,  the  profoundest  of  bourgeois  phil- 
osophers. Lombroso,  the  illustrious  comedian, 
went  him  one  better :  he  seriously  declared  that 
social  statistics  proclaimed  the  inferiority  of 
woman,  since  the  number  of  female  criminals  is 
below  that  of  male  criminals;  while  buried  in 
these  figures,  he  might  have  added  that  the  sta- 
tistics of  insanity  demonstrate  the  same  inferior- 
ity. Thus  we  see  that  ethics,  anatomy,  physiol- 
ogy, social  statistics  and  history  riveted  forever 
upon  woman  the  chains  of  domestic  servitude.. 

II. 
Bachofen,  Morgan  and  a  crowd  of  anthropolog- 
ists have  revised  the  opinion  of  the  historians  and 
philosophers  upon  the  role  played  by  woman  in 
the  past.  They  have  shown  that  everywhere  the 
paternal  family,  which  subordinated  woman  to 
man,  had  been  preceded  by  the  maternal  family, 
which  gave  the  first  place  to  woman.  The  Greek 
language  contains  the  record  of  her  two  condi- 
tions :  while  the  Spartans,  among  whom  matri- 
archal customs  persisted,  still  continued  to  call 
her  despoina,  the  mistress  of  the  house,  the  sov- 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION  119 

ereign,  the  other  Greeks  gave  to  the  wife  the 
name  damar,  the  subdued,  the  vanquished.  The 
Odyssey,  in  characterizing  Nausicaa,  says  that 
she  is  parthenos  admes,  the  girl  not  subdued,  that 
is  to  say,  without  a  husband,  without  a  master. 
The  modern  expression  "yoke  of  marriage"  pre- 
serves the  ancient  idea. 

Hesiod,  in  opposition  to  Homer,  who  tells  only 
of  patriarchal  customs,  preserves  precious  recol- 
lections of  the  matriarchal  family;  he  tells  us 
that  when  it  existed  man,  even  if  he  were  a  hun- 
dred years  old,  lived  with  his  prudent  mother, 
—  he  was  fed  in  her  house  like  a  great  child. 
(Works  and  Days,  V,  129-130.)  It  was  not  the 
woman  who  then  had  the  "child's  brain,"  but  the 
man ;  everything  seems  in  fact  to  prove  that  her 
intelligence  was  the  first  to  develop.  This  intel- 
lectual superiority  caused  her  to  be  deified  before 
man  in  the  primitive  religions  of  Egypt,  the  In- 
dies, Asia  and  Greece,  and  caused  the  first  inven- 
tions of  the  arts  and  trades,  with  the  exception 
of  metal  working,  to  be  attributed  to  goddesses 
and  not  to  gods.  The  Muses,  originally  three  in 
number,  were  in  Greece,  even  in  preference  to 
Apollo,  the  goddesses  of  poetry,  music  and  the 
dance.  Isis,  "mother  of  corn  ears  and  lady  of 
bread,"  and  Demeter,  lawgiver,  had  taught  the 
Egyptians  and  Greeks  the  tillage  of  barley  and 


120  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

wheat  and  made  them  renounce  their  anthropo- 
phagic  repasts.  The  woman  appeared  to  the  pre- 
patriarchal  man,  like  the  Germans  whom  Taci- 
tus knew,  as  having  within  herself  something 
holy  and  providential,  aliqiiid  sanctum  et  provi- 
dum  (Germania  VIII).  Her  prudence  and  fore- 
sight gave  her  this  divine  character.  Must  we 
conclude  that  this  intellectual  superiority,  which 
manifested  itself  when  the  economic  environment 
is  rudimentary,  is  a  natural  phenomenon  ? 

But,  in  any  case,  it  may  be  asserted  that  the 
vitality  of  woman  is  superior  to  that  of  man.  The 
life  insurance  companies  of  the  United  States, 
England  and  Holland,  which  do  not  base  their 
calculation  upon  scientific  fairy  tales  of  the  in- 
tellectuals but  upon  mortality  tables,  pay  woman 
an  annuity  below  that  which  they  give  man,  be- 
cause her  probabilities  of  death  are  less.  Here 
for  example  is  the  annuity  paid  for  a  capital  of 
$i,ooo  by  American  and  Dutch  companies:* 

New  York.  Holland. 

Age.                        Men.  Women.  Men.    '   Women. 

50  years    $76.47  $69.57  $76.80              |  73-6o 

60  years    97.24  88.03  98-50                  93-50 

70  years    134-31  122.48  142.00                136.70 

80  years    183.95  168.00  222.70               211.70 

*  The  French  companies  make  no  differences  be- 
tween the  sexes  because  they  pay  very  small  annui- 
ties. La  G^nerale,  the  most  important  one  in  France, 
gives  for  $1,000  at  the  age  of  50  years  an  annuity  of 
$64.20;  at  60  years  $80.80;  at  70  years  $118.50;  at  80 
years  $134.70.  Thus  it  realizes  immense  profits;  its 
shares  which  in  1819  were  worth  750  francs  each  were 
quoted   last   January   at    31,300    francs. 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION  121 

It  may  be  objected  that  man,  leading  a  more 
active  life,  is  more  subject  to  accidents,  diseases, 
and  other  causes  of  death,  and  that  consequently 
the  prolonged  life  of  woman  does  not  prove  the 
higher  vitality  of  her  organism,  but  the  advant- 
ages of  a  life  less  subject  to  accident. 

The  answer  to  this  objection  is  found  in  the 
statistics  of  the  various  nations.  There  is  in  no 
country  a  perfect  equilibrium  between  the  num- 
ber of  women  and  that  of  men;  for  i,ooo  men 
there  are  in  Belgium  1,005  women,  in  France 
1,014,  in  England  1,062,  in  Scotland  1,071  and 
in  Norway  1,091.  Nevertheless  in  these  coun- 
tries with  the  feminine  preponderance  there  is 
an  excess  of  masculine  births :  of  the  whole  of 
Western  Europe  for  every  1000  girls  there  are 
born  from  1,040  to  1,060  boys.  If,  in  spite  of  this 
excess  of  masculine  births,  more  girls  survive,  it 
is  because  the  greater  mortality  of  the  boys  shows 
the  balance  in  favor  of  the  girls ;  and  this  higher 
mortality  cannot  be  explained  by  the  life  of  man 
being  more  subject  to  accident,  since  it  is  ob- 
served at  an  early  age,  notably  during  the  first 
two  years.  All  the  diseases  of  childhood,  with 
the  exception  of  diphtheria  and  whooping  cough, 
are  to  a  perceptible  extent  more  fatal  among  boys 
than  among  girls ;  from  zero  to  five  years  the 
male  sex  is  particularly  frail ;  at  all  ages,  except 


132  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

between  ten  and  fifteen  years,  the  male  mortality 
is  in  excess  of  the  female. 

The  superior  vitality  of  the  female  sex  is  also 
noticeable  in  the  greater  ease  with  which  it  builds 
up  its  organism.  M.  Iribe,  superintendent  of  the 
sanitarium  of  Hendaye,  to  which  are  sent  Paris- 
ian children  from  three  to  fourteen  years  of  age, 
who  are  afflicted  with  anaemia,  incipient  tuber- 
culosis, scrofula  and  rickets,  reports  that  at  the 
time  of  their  dismissal,  at  the  end  of  six  months, 
the  progress  in  weight,  girth  and  chest  develop- 
ment is  incomparably  higher  in  the  girls  than  in 
the  boys,  the  increase  in  weight  is  double  and 
often  more. 

The  same  statement  has  been  made  by  other 
superintendents  of  sanitariums.  (Bulletin  Med- 
ical, No.  8i,  1903.) 

Woman  undeniably  possesses  a  greater  vitality 
than  man.  M.  Gustav  Loisel  has  made  inquiry 
"as  to  whether  this  difference  existed  in  embry- 
onic life,  and  what  may  be  its  cause?"  He  has 
communicated  the  results  of  his  inquiries  to  the 
Biological  Society  of  Paris,  which  published  them 
in  its  Bulletin  of  November  6,  1903. 

M,  Loisel  availed  himself  of  792  weights  and 
measurements    made    upon    72    foetuses   at    the 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION  123 

Maternity  Hospital  of  Paris  by  C.  E.  Legou  ;* 
from  the  following  weights  of  the  foetuses  at 
three,  four,  five  and  six  months  he  obtains  the 
following  figures : 

Males.   Females.   Differences. 
Grammes.       Grammes. 
Total   weight  ...1908.18     1708.11    200.07  in  favor  of  males 

Kidneys    16.87        i7-i9       2.67  in  favor  of  males 

Superrenal  glands    5.15  6.43       0.32  in  favor  of  females 

Liver    88.35        96.31        1-28  in  favor  of  females 

Spleen    2.59         2.38        7.90  in  favor  of  females 

Thymus    3.89  3.97       0.21   in  favor  of  males 

Heart    10.97       12.60        0.08  in  favor  of  females 

Lungs     47.29        44.62        1.63  in  favor  of  females 

Brain    236.94      235.17        1.17  in  favor  of  males 

"These  figures  thus  show  us,"  says  M.  Loisel, 
"a  preponderance  already  existing  in  favor  of  the 
females  as  regards  the  kidneys,  the  superrenal 
glands,  the  liver,  the  thvmus  and  the  heart ;  this 
predominance  is  the  more  noticeable  since  the 
total  weight  of  the  body  is  larger  in  the  male  than 
in  the  female." 

If  now  we  take  the  relation  between  the  total 
weight  and  the  weight  of  the  organs  which  are 
heaviest  in  the  male,  we  find  that  the  proportion 
is  still  in  favor  of  the  female : 

PROPORTION    OF    TOTAL    WEIGHT. 

Males.  Females. 

Spleen  1  to  736  1  to  718 

Lungs    • 1  to     40  1  to     38 

Brain  1  to       8  1  to       7 


*  E.  Legou.  "Some  Considerations  on  the  Develop- 
ment of  the  Foetus."  Paris.  1903.  The  weights  and 
measurements  of  M.  Legou  were  made  for  official  use. 


124  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

The  organs  here  examined,  brain  included,  are 
thus  absolutely  or  relatively  heavier  in  the  female 
foetus  than  in  the  male  foetus. 

M,  Loisel  has  also  examined  into  the  propor- 
tion of  the  weights  of  the  different  organs  to  the 
total  weight  according  to  the  age  of  the  foetus. 
He  has  prepared  a  table,  from  which  I  take  only 
the  figures  concerning  the  brain : 

Proportion    of 
AGE  TOTAL  WEIGHT        weight  of  brain 

to  total  weight. 
Males      Females      Males  Females 
Grammes  Grammes 

I  I 

3  Months 58.33  65.96  —  

6.5  ', 

I  I 

4  Months 167.23  182.58  

7.3  6.6 

I  I 

5  Months 336.33  295.00 

7-6  75 

I  r 

6  Months 732.58  636.00  

8:3  7-i 

The  weight  of  the  male  foetus,  which  is  below 
that  of  the  female  foetus,  at  three  months,  when 
the  sex  has  just  been  determined,  grows  more 
rapidly  and  the  proportion  between  the  weight 
is  always  to  the  advantage  of  the  females  from 
the  fourth  month  on. 

"To  sum  up,"  says  M.  Loisel,  ''all  the  organs 
are  heavier  in  the  female  foetus  than  in  the  male 
foetus  up  to  about  the  fourth  month.  The  pre- 
dominance then  passes  over  to  the  male,  but  only 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION  125 

for  the  lungs  and  the  organs  for  sex-union,  thus 
the  cardiac  muscle  always  remains  heavier  in  the 
female.  The  organs  which  are  of  real  service  to 
the  individual  during  the  embryonic  life  always 
remain  more  developed  in  the  female  sex. 

"If  now  we  consider  that  the  differences  in 
favor  of  the  females  are  especially  in  the  liver, 
the  heart,  the  superrenal  glands  and  the  kidneys, 
we  shall  come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  greater 
vitality  of  the  female  organisms  corresponds  to 
their  being  better  nourished  and  better  purified."* 

IIL 

The  superior  organization  possessed  by  woman 
at  birth,  assuring  her  throughout  her  life  a  much 
greater  vitality,  is  probably  demanded  by  the  part 
she  plays  in  the  production  of  the  species,  a  part 
altogether  more  prolonged  and  exhausting  than 
that  of  the  man  who,  when  fertilization  is  ac- 
complished, has  no  more  to  do,  while  then  the 
travail  of  woman  begins,  to  continue  during 
long  months,  through  pregnancy  and  after  birth. 
The  women  of  savage  tribes  suckle  their  children 
for  two  years  and  more.     It  sometimes  happens 


*  The  latest  observations  upon  ants  and  bees  tend 
to  prove  that  the  fertilized  eggs  would  give  birth  to 
females  and  to  workers;  and  the  nonfertillzed  to 
males,  which  consequently  would  be  born  from  eggs 
that  are  less  comolex. 


126  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

that  the  male  pays  dear  for  his  inutility ;  after 
union,  the  bees  kill  the  males,  and  the  male  spider 
must  hastily  take  himself  off  that  he  may  not  be 
devoured  by  the  larger  and  stronger  female. 
Among  the  Sakawas,  at  the  annual  feast  of  My- 
litta  Anaitis,  they  sacrificed  at  Babylon  the  hand- 
some slave  who  had  just  united  with  the  priestess 
who  incarnated  the  Assyrian  goddess.  This 
bloody  religious  ceremonial  must  have  been  a  re- 
production of  an  Amazonian  custom. 

The  life  of  savagery  and  barbarism  permits 
woman  to  develop  her  superiority  from  birth ; 
each  sex  there  has  its  special  function ;  it  is  the 
division  of  labor  in  embryo.  The  man,  whose 
muscular  system  is  more  developed,  "fights, 
hunts,  fishes  and  sits  down,"  according  to  the 
Australian  native,  he  regards  all  the  rest  as  un- 
der the  jurisdiction  of  woman,  whose  function 
puts  brain  activity  into  play  at  an  earlier  epoch. 
She  has  charge  of  the  communal  house,  which 
often  shelters  a  clan  of  more  than  one  hundred 
individuals ;  she  prepares  clothing  from  skins  and 
other  raw  materials ;  she  charges  herself  with  the 
cultivation  of  the  garden,  the  rearing  of  domestic 
animals  and  the  manufacture  of  household  uten- 
sils; she  preserves,  economizes,  cooks,  distributes 
the  provisions,  vegetable  and  animal,  which  have 
been  gathered  during  the  course  of  the  year ;  and 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION  137 

like  the  Valkyries  of  the  Scandinavians  and  the 
Keres  of  the  pre-Homeric  Greeks,  she  accom- 
panies the  warrior  on  the  field  battle,  aids  in 
the  fray,  raises  him  up  if  he  is  wounded  and 
cares  for  him;  her  assistance  is  so  appreciated 
that,  according  to  Tacitus,  the  barbarians  who 
under  the  leadership  of  Civilis  revolted  against 
Vespasian,  were  seized  with  pity  for  the  Roman 
soldiers  because  their  wives  did  not  accompany 
them  when  they  marched  to  combat.  Plato  like- 
wise who,  like  the  chosen  ones  initiated  in  the 
Eleusinian  Mysteries,  was  more  informed  re- 
garding ancient  custjims  than  is  supposed,  makes 
the  women  to  be  present  in  the  battles  of  the 
warriors  of  his  Republic. 

These  multiple  and  diverse  functions,  which 
obliged  woman  to  reflect,  to  calculate,  to  think 
of  the  morrow  and  to  look  ahead  at  long  range, 
must  necessarily  have  developed  her  intellectual 
faculties ;  thus  the  craniologists  say  that  only  a 
slight  difference  exists  between  the  cranial  capa- 
city of  the  two  sexes  in  the  negroes,  the  Austral- 
ians, and  the  red  skins,  while  they  find  that  it 
goes  on  increasing  among  civilized  people.  Wo- 
man is  for  the  careless  and  improvident  savage, 
a  providence ;  she  is  the  prudent  and  prescient 
being  who  presides  over  his  destinies  from  birth 
to  death.    Man,  making  his  religions  with  the 


128  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

events  and  the  intellectual  acquisitions  of  his 
daily  life,  was  thus  obliged  to  begin  by  deifying 
woman.  The  pre-Homeric  Greeks  and  Romans 
had  placed  their  destinies  under  the  control  of 
goddesses,  the  Fates  —  Moirai,  Parcae  —  whose 
name  signifies  in  the  Latin  language  "sparing," 
"economic,"  and  in  the  Greek  the  part  which 
falls  to  each  one  in  the  distribution  of  food  or 
of  booty. 

If  we  relieve  the  rich  and  poetical  Greek  myth- 
ology of  the  symbolical,  allegorical  and  myst- 
ical lucubrations  with  which  the  philosophers  and 
the  poets  of  the  classical  epoch  and  the  Alexan- 
drine period  have  overloaded  and  complicated  it, 
and  which  the  German  mythologists,  servilely 
copied  by  those  of  France  and  England,  have 
carried  on  to  their  own  more  perfect  confusion, 
it  becomes  an  inestimable  storehouse  of  prehis- 
toric customs  which  preserves  the  memory  of 
the  manners  which  travelers  and  anthropologists 
now  observe  living  again  among  the  savages  and 
barbarous  nations  of  Africa  and  the  New  World. 
The  mythological  legend  furnishes  us  with  in- 
formation of  the  relative  value  of  feminine  and 
masculine  intelligence  among  the  Greeks,  before 
they  had  entered  upon  the  patriarchal  period. 

Jupiter,  the  "father  of  the  gods,"  as  Homer, 
Hesiod  and  Aeschylos    call    him,  after    having 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION  129 

driven  the  feminine  divinities  from  Olympus,  en- 
throned there  the  patriarchate,  which  for  some 
generations  had  been  established  upon  earth;  the 
religious  heaven  always  reflects  terrestrial  man- 
ners as  the  moon  reflects  the  light  of  the  sun. 
But  Jupiter,  who  like  every  barbarian,  knew 
how  to  use  his  fists  (Iliad  XV.  228),  who  boasted 
that  he  was  the  strongest  of  the  gods,  and  who 
to  dominate  the  others  kept  next  his  throne  two 
servants,  Force  and  Violence,  always  ready  to 
obey  his  orders,  was  inadequately  prepared  by 
his  intellectual  qualities  to  replace  woman  in  the 
government  of  the  Olympian  family;  in  order 
to  supply  the  capacities  which  were  lacking  to 
him,  Hesiod  tells  us  that  he  married  Metis,  "the 
wisest  among  mortals  and  gods."  The  savage 
and  the  barbarian,  that  he  may  take  into  himself 
the  courage  of  a  fallen  enemy,  devours  his  throb- 
bing heart ;  Jupiter  carried  off  Metis  to  assimilate 
her  cunning,  her  prudence  and  her  wisdom,  for 
her  name  in  the  Greek  language  has  these  diverse 
meanings ;  these  qualities  were  considered  as  be- 
longing to  woman. 

But  the  process  of  assimilation  took  some  time, 
if  we  may  judge  from  the  rascally  farce  played 
upon  him  by  Prometheus.  The  latter  killed  and 
butchered  an  enormous  ox,  in  one  pile  he  placed 
the  flesh  which  he  covered  with  the  skin  upon 


130  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

which  he  deposited  the  entrails;  in  another  pile 
he  put  the  bare  bones  which  he  adroitly  con- 
cealed under  heaps  of  fat.  "You  have  divided 
the  parts  very  badly,"  said  the  father  of  gods 
and  men.  "Most  worthy  Jupiter,  greatest  of  liv- 
ing gods,  take  the  part  that  your  wisdom  coun- 
sels you  to  choose,"  replied  the  astute  Prome- 
theus. The  ruler  of  the  heavens,  listening  only 
to  his  gluttony,  laid  both  hands  upon  the  heap 
of  fat  amid  the  laughter  of  the  Olympians ;  his 
wrath  was  terrible  when  he  saw  the  bare  bones. 
(Theogony  435  et  seq.)  Such  a  farce  would 
hardly  have  been  played  in  the  Olympian  heaven 
had  it  not  been  that  on  the  earth  similar  tests 
had  been  required  to  prove  to  the  Father  that 
his  intellectual  faculties  did  not  justify  him  in 
taking  the  place  of  the  Mother  in  the  leader- 
ship of  the  family  and  the  management  of  its 
property. 

The  higher  position  in  the  family  and  society, 
which  man  conquered  by  brute  force,  while  it 
compelled  him  to  a  mental  activity  to  which  he 
was  little  accustomed,  at  the  same  time  put  at 
his  disposal  opportunities  for  reflection  and  de- 
velopment which  constantly  increased.  Woman, 
"subdued,"  as  the  Greek  expression  has  it,  shut 
up  in  the  narrow  circle  of  the  family,  the  leader- 
ship of  which  had  been  taken   from  her,  and 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION  131 

having  little  or  no  contact  with  the  outside  world, 
saw  on  the  contrary  a  great  reduction  of  the 
means  of  development  which  she  had  enjoyed, 
and  to  complete  her  subjection  she  was  forbid- 
den the  intellectual  culture  which  was  given  to 
man.  If  in  spite  of  these  fetters  and  these  dis- 
advantages, the  disastrous  effects  of  which  can- 
not be  exaggerated,  the  brain  of  woman  con- 
tinued to  evolve,  it  was  because  woman's  intel- 
ligence profited  through  the  progress  realized  by 
the  masculine  brain;  for  one  sex  transmits  to 
the  other  the  qualities  which  it  has  acquired; 
thus  pullets  of  certain  varieties  inherit  the  spurs 
which  are  highly  developed  among  the  cocks, 
while  in  other  varieties  they  transmit  to  the  males 
their  exaggerated  crests.  "It  is  fortunate,"  says 
Darwin  upon  this  point,  "that  the  equal  trans- 
mission of  the  characteristics  of  both  sexes  has 
been  a  general  rule  in  the  whole  series  of  mam- 
mals, otherwise,  it  is  probable  that  man  would 
have  become  as  superior  to  woman  in  intellectual 
power  as  the  peacock  is  to  the  female  in  orna- 
mental plumage."  (Descent  of  Man  —  Sexual 
Selection,  VIII  and  XIX.) 

But  defects  as  well  as  valuable  qualities  are 
transmitted  from  one  sex  to  the  other :  if  woman 
has  profited  by  the  brain-growth  of  man,  he  has 
in  his  turn  been  retarded  in  his  development  by 


132  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

the  sluggishness  in  the  development  of  woman's 
brain^  produced  by  the  reduction  to  the  smallest 
minimum  of  intellectual  activity  to  which  he 
has  condemned  her.  The  breeders  who  seek  the 
choicest  results  are  as  careful  to  have  irreproach- 
able females  as  males;  amateur  cockfighters  at- 
tach as  much  importance  to  the  selection  of  the 
pullets  as  to  the  cocks,  they  produce  only  from 
those  which  are  armed  with  spurs  and  which 
have  the  fighting  spirit.  It  may  be  said  that  hu- 
manity, since  it  emerged  from  communism  of 
the  clan  to  live  under  the  system  of  private  prop- 
erty, has  been  developed  by  the  efforts  of  one 
sex  alone  and  that  its  evolution  has  been  retarded 
through  the  obstacles  interposed  by  the  other 
sex.  Man  by  systematically  depriving  woman  of 
the  means  of  development,  material  and  intellect- 
ual, has  made  of  her  a  force  retarding  human 
progress. 

In  fact  if  we  study  and  compare  the  different 
periods  of  savagery  and  barbarism,  we  cannot 
but  observe  the  continuous  and  remarkable  prog- 
ress in  human  mind,  because  women  and  men, 
exercising  freely  their  physical  and  mental  fac- 
ulties, contribute  equally  to  the  evolution  of  the 
species ;  this  has  been  retarded  ever  since  human- 
ity entered  into  the  period  of  civilization  and 
private  property,  because  then  woman,  constraiti- 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION  133 

ed  and  confined  in  her  development,  cannot  con- 
tribute to  it  in  so  effective  a  way.  The  senile 
stagnation  in  which  China  has  vegetated  for 
more  than  a  thousand  years  can  only  be  attrib- 
uted to  the  degradation  of  woman,  which  has 
gone  to  the  point  of  the  cruel  mutilation  of  her 
feet  that  she  may  be  imprisoned  the  more  closely 
m  the  woman's  quarters.  Europe  also  suffers 
from  the  degradation  of  woman,  since  in  spite 
of  the  extraordinary  material  progress  of  these 
last  two  thousand  years  and  the  increasing  and 
no  less  extraordinary  accumulation  of  human 
knowledge,  it  cannot  be  maintained  that  the  brain 
of  the  civilized  modern  exceeds  in  power  and 
capacity  that  of  the  Greeks  of  the  classic  epoch, 
which  extends  from  the  seventh  to  the  fourth 
century  before  the  Christian  era.  It  is  certain 
that  a  Victor  Hugo,  a  Zola,  or  any  university 
graduate  or  doctor  has  stored  in  his  brain  an 
abundance  of  positive  and  diversified  conceptions 
not  possessed  by  Aeschylus,  Anaxagoras,  Prota- 
goras and  Aristotle,  but  that  does  not  prove  that 
his  imagination  and  his  intelligence,  or  that  of 
his  contemporaries  is  more  rich,  more  varied  and 
more  vast  than  that  of  the  generations  of  Ionia 
and  Attica,  who  were  the  artificers  of  that  incom- 
parable budding  and  blossoming  of  science,  phi- 
losophy, literature  and  art  at  which  history  marv- 


134  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

els  and  who  reveled  in  that  subtle  and  paradox- 
ical play  of  sophistical  philosophy,  the  like  of 
which  has  not  again  been  seen.  The  sophists  — 
Photagoras,  Gorgias,  Socrates,  Plato,  etc.,  stated, 
discussed  and  solved  the  problems  of  the  spir- 
itualistic philosophy  and  many  others  besides :  yet 
the  Hellenes  of  Asia  Minor  and  of  Greece  had 
emerged  from  barbarism  only  a  few  centuries 
before.  Many  reasons  may  be  cited  to  explain 
this  arrest  in  human  development,  but  the  princi- 
pal one  is  the  subjection  of  woman. 

IV. 
Capitalist  production,  which  takes  charge  of 
most  of  the  labors  to  which  woman  devoted  her- 
self in  the  gentile  house,  has  levied  into  its  army 
of  wage-workers  in  factory,  shop,  office  and 
schoolroom,  the  wives  and  daughters  of  the 
working  class  and  of  the  small  bourgeoisie,  in 
order  to  procure  cheap  labor.  Its  pressing  need 
of  intellectual  capacities  has  set  aside  the  vener- 
able and  venerated  axiom  of  masculine  ethics : 
''to  read,  write  and  count  ought  to  be  all  of  a 
woman's  knowledge;"  it  has  required  that  girls 
like  boys  be  instructed  in  the  rudiments  of  the 
sciences.  The  first  step  once  taken,  they  could 
not  be  forbidden  to  enter  the  universities.  They 
proved  that  the  feminine  brain,  which  the  Intel- 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION  136 

iectuals  had  declared  a  "child's  brain,"  was  as 
capable  as  the  masculine  brain  of  receiving  all 
scientific  instruction.  The  abstract  sciences 
(mathematics,  geometry,  mechanics,  etc.),  the 
first  whose  study  had  been  accessible  to  woman, 
were  also  the  first  in  which  they  could  give  the 
measure  of  their  intellectual  capacities ;  they  are 
now  attacking  the  experimental  sciences  (physi- 
olog>',  physics,  chemistry,  applied  mechanics, 
etc),  in  America  and  Europe  there  arises  a 
throng  of  women  who  are  marching  on  a  level 
with  men  in  spite  of  the  inferiority  of  the  con- 
ditions of  development  in  which  they  have  lived 
since  their  first  infancy. 

As  Capitalism  has  not  snatched  woman  from 
the  domestic  hearth  and  launched  her  into  so- 
cial production  to  emancipate  her,  but  to  exploit 
her  more  ferociously  than  man,  so  it  has  been 
careful  not  to  overthrow  the  economic,  legal, 
political  and  moral  barriers  which  had  been 
raised  to  seclude  her  in  the  marital  dwelling. 
Woman,  exploited  by  capital,  endures  the  miser- 
ies of  the  free  laborer  and  bears  in  addition  her 
chains  of  the  past.  Her  economic  misery  is  ag- 
gravated ;  instead  of  being  supported  by  her 
father  or  husband,  to  whose  rule  she  still  sub- 
mits, she  is  obliged  to  earn  her  living;  and  under 
the  pretext  that  she  has  fewer  necessities  than 


136  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

man,  her  labor  is  paid  less;  and  when  her  daily 
toil  in  the  shop,  the  office  or  school  is  ended,  her 
labor  in  the  household  begins.  Motherhood,  the 
sacred,  the  highest  of  social  functions,  becomes 
in  capitalistic  society  a  cause  of  horrible  misery, 
economic  and  physiologic.  The  social  and  eco- 
nomic condition  of  woman  is  a  danger  for  the 
reproduction  of  the  species. 

But  this  crushing  and  pitiful  condition  an- 
nounces the  end  of  her  servitude,  which  begins 
with  the  establishment  of  private  property  and 
which  can  end  only  with  its  abolition.  Civilized 
humanity,  oppressed  by  the  mechanical  mode  of 
production,  turns  its  face  toward  a  society,  based 
on  common  property,  in  which  woman,  delivered 
from  the  economic,  legal  and  moral  chains  which 
bind  her,  may  develop  freely  her  physical  and  in- 
tellectual faculties,  as  in  the  time  of  the  com- 
munism of  the  savages. 

The  savages,  to  forbid  primitive  promiscuity 
and  successfully  restrain  the  circle  of  sexual  re- 
lations, found  no  other  means  than  to  separate 
the  sexes;  there  are  reasons  for  believing  that 
the  women  took  the  initiative  in  this  separation, 
which  the  specialization  of  their  functions  con- 
solidated and  emphasized.  This  was  manifested 
socially  by  religious  ceremonials  and  secret  lan- 
guages peculiar  to  each  set  and  even  by  strug- 


THE  WOMAN  QUESTION  137 

gles;*  and  after  having  taken  the  character  of 
violent  antagonism,  it  ended  in  the  brutal  subjec- 
tion of  woman,  which  still  survives  although  it  is 
progressively  attenuated  in  proportion  as  the 
competition  of  the  two  sexes  becomes  more  gen- 
eral and  intense  upon  the  economic  field.  But 
the  modern  antagonism  will  not  end  with  the 
victory  of  one  sex  over  the  other,  for  it  is  one  of 
the  phenomena  of  the  struggle  of  labor  against 
capital,  which  will  find  its  solution  in  the  emanci- 
pation of  the  working  class  in  which  women  as 
well  as  men  are  incorporated. 

The  technique  of  production  which  tends  to 
suppress  the  specialization  of  trades  and  func- 
tions and  to  replace  muscular  effort  by  attention 
?.nd  intellectual  skill  and  which,  the  more  it  is 
perfected,  mingles  and  confounds  man  and  wo- 
man the  more  in  social  labor,  will  prevent  the 
return  of  the  conditions  which  in  savage  and 
barbarous  nations  had  maintained  the  separation 
of  the  sexes.  Common  property  will  put  an  end 
to  the  economic  antagonism  of  specialization. 

But  if  it  is  possible  to  catch  a  glimpse  of  the 
end  of  female  servitude  and  of  the  antagonism 


*  A.  W.  Howit,  who  observed  among  the  Austral- 
ians a  species  of  sexual  totemism,  says  that  it  often 
happens  that  the  women  and  men  of  one  and  the  same 
clan  fight,  when  the  animal  that  serves  as  the  totem 
for  one  sex  is  killed  by  the  other  sex. 


138  THE  WOMAN  QUESTION 

of  the  sexes  and  to  conceive  for  the  human  spe- 
cies an  era  of  incomparable  bodily  and  mental 
progress,  brought  about  by  women  and  men  of 
a  high  development  in  muscle  and  brain,  it  is  im- 
possible to  foresee  the  sexual  relations  of  free 
and  equal  women  and  men  who  will  not  be  united 
nor  separated  by  sordid  material  interests  and  by 
the  gross  ethics  engendered  by  such  interests. 
But  if  we  may  judge  by  the  present  and  the  past, 
men,  in  whom  the  genetic  passion  is  more  violent 
and  more  continuous  than  in  women — the  same 
phenomenon  is  observed  in  the  males  and  females 
of  the  whole  animal  series  —  will  be  obliged  to 
exhibit  their  physical  and  intellectual  qualities  to 
win  their  sweethearts.  Sexual  selection,  which, 
as  Darwin  has  shown,  fulfilled  an  important  role 
in  the  development  of  the  animal  species  and 
which,  with  rare  exceptions,  has  ceased  to  play 
this  part  in  the  Indo-European  races  for  about 
three  thousand  years,  will  again  become  one  of 
the  most  active  factors  in  the  perfecting  of  the 
human  race. 

Motherhood  and  love  will  permit  women  to 
regain  the  higher  position  which  she  occupied  in 
primitive  societies,  the  memory  of  which  has  been 
preserved  by  the  legends  and  myths  of  the  ancient 
religions. 


THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL 

Our  comrades  in  Germany  were  discussing 
seme  time  since  the  question  whether  SociaUsm 
is  a  science.  SociaHsm  is  not  and  cannot  be  a 
science  for  the  simple  reason  that  it  is  a  pohtical 
party  and  must  disappear  when  its  work  is  ac- 
compHshed  after  the  abplitipn  of  the  classes  which 
gave  birth  to  it;  but  the  end  which  it  pursues  is 
scientific. 

Guizot,  who  had  a  vague  idea  of  the  theory  of 
the  class  struggle — himself  a  product  of  the  Rev- 
olution, which  was  a  dramatic  struggle  between 
classes — said  with  good  reason  that  a  class  can- 
not emancipate  itself  until  it  possesses  the  qual- 
ities requisite  for  taking  the  leadership  of  society ; 
now  one  of  these  qualities  is  to  have  a  more  or 
less  definite  conception  of  the  social  order  which 
it  proposes  to  substitute  for  that  which  is  op- 
pressing it.  This  conception  cannot  but  be  a  social 
ideal,  or,  to  employ  a  scientific  word,  a  social 
hypothesis;  but   an   hypothesis,   as   well   in   the 

189 


140  THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL 

natural  sciences  as  in  social  science,  may  be  utop* 
ian  or  scientific. 

Socialism,  because  it  is  a  political  party  of  the 
oppressed  class,  has  therefore  an  ideal.  .  It  groups 
and  organizes  the  efforts  of  the  individuals  who 
wish  to  build  on  the  ruins  of  capitalist  society, 
based  upon  individual  property,  an  ideal  or  hypo- 
thetical society  based  upon  common  property  in 
the  means  of  production.) 

Only  through  the  class  struggle  can  modern 
socialism  realize  its  social  ideal,  which  possesses 
the  qualities  demanded  of  any  hypothesis  that 
claims  a  scientific  character.  The  fact  of  choos- 
ing a  scientific  goal,  and  of  trying  to  reach  it  only 
through  the  class  struggle,  distinguishes  it  from 
the  Socialism  of  1848,  which  was  pursuing 
through  the  reconciliation  of  classes  a  social  ideal 
which  could  not  but  be  Utopian  considering  the 
historic  moment  in  which  it  was  conceived. 
Socialism  has  thus  evolved  from  Utopia  into  sci- 
ence. Engels  has  traced  the  main  lines  of  this 
evolution  in  his  memorable  pamphlet,  "Socialism, 
Utopian  and  Scientific."  It  is  the  samewithall 
sciences,  which  begin  with  Utopia  to  arrive  at 
positive  knowledge ;  this  course  is  imposed  by  the 
very  nature  of  the  human  mind. 

Man  progresses  in  social  life  as  in  intellectual 
life,  only  by  starting  from  the  known  and  travel- 


THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL  141 

ing  toward  the  unknown,  and  that  unknown  must 
be  represented  by  the  imagination ;  that  imag- 
inary conception  of  the  unknown,  which  cannot 
but  be  hypothetical,  is  one  of  the  most  powerful 
incentives  to  action,  it  is  the  very  condition  of 
every  forward  step.  It  is  natural  that  men  like 
Bernstein  in  Germany  and  Jaures  in  France 
should  seek  to  domesticate  Socialism  and  to  put 
it  in  tow  of  liberalism,  accusing  it  of  hypnotis- 
ing its  soldiers  with  an  ideal  of  the  year  3000, 
which  makes  them  live  in  the  expectation  of  a 
Messianic  "catastrophe"  and  reject  the  imme- 
diate advantages  of  an  understanding  and  co- 
operation with  bourgeois  parties,  and  which 
blinds  them  to  their  shocking  errors  regarding  the 
concentration  of  wealth,  the  disappearance  of 
small  industry  and  the  middle  class,  the  increase 
of  class  antagonisms,  the  spreading  and  intens- 
ification of  the  misery  of  the  working  class,  etc. 
These  errors  may  have  been  plausible  hypotheses 
before  1848,  but  since  then  events  have  shown 
their  falsity.  This  unfortunate  ideal  prevents 
them  from  descending  from  the  revolutionary 
heights  to  accept  the  responsibilities  of  power 
and  of  setting  aside  the  cause  of  labor  to  devote 
themselves  entirely  tongue  and  pen,  to  the  re- 
habilitation of  a  millionaire  leader;  it  obliges 
them  to  oppose  all  exterior  policies  and  acts,  to 


143  THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL 

vote  not  a  cent  nor  a  soldier  for  colonial  expedi- 
tions, which  carry  labor,  Christianity,  syphilis 
and  the  alcoholism  of  civilization  to  the  barbaric 
tribes.  The  neo-methodists  of  the  ancient  and 
outworn  gospel  of  the  brotherhood  of  classes 
advise  the  socialists  to  suppress  their  ideal,  or, 
since  it  unfortunately  captivates  the  masses  of 
the  people,  to  speak  of  it  without  caring  for  it, 
as  Jaures  does,  that  they  may  consecrate  them- 
selves to  practical  necessities,  to  the  vast  plans 
of  agricultural  and  industrial  co-operation,  to 
popular  universities,  etc. 

The  dilettantes  of  politics,  these  practical 
groundlings  of  opportunism,  nevertheless  hold 
themselves  up  for  transcendent  idealists  and 
march  with  their  eyes  fixed  upon  the  stars,  be- 
cause they  substitute  for  ideas  a  brilliant  or- 
chestra of  sonorous  words  and  eternal  principles. 

These  bourgeois  idealists  edge  their  way  in 
everywhere;  after  the  Revolution  of  1789  they 
rebuked  the  scientists  for  their  hypotheses  and 
their  theories ;  according  to  them  science  should 
have  stopped  with  the  study  of  facts  in  them- 
selves without  dreaming  of  uniting  them  into  a 
general  system.  "What  is  the  use  of  cutting 
stones  without  putting  up  a  building,"  replied 
Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire,  the  genial  disciple  of 
Lamarck,  who  lived  to  see  the  extinction  of  his 


THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL  143 

theory  on  the  continuity  of  species,  which,  only 
thirty  years  after  his  death,  was  to  take  on  a 
new  birth  with  Darwin.  They  arc.  still  reproach- 
ing the  physiologists  for  wasting  their  time  in 
elaborating  hypotheses  which  ^ast  on  an  average 
only  three  years  and  which  cannot  explain 
what  takes  place  in  a  muscle  which  contracts 
and  in  a  brain  which  thinks.  They  grumble 
against  the  hypotheses  of  the  physicists,  who  do 
not  know  the  real  nature  of  elasticity,  of  elec- 
trical conductivity,  or  even  what  happens  when 
a  particle  of  sugar  is  dissolved.  They  would  like 
to  prohibit  scientists  from  any  speculation  be- 
cause it  is  disastrous  and  may  lead  into  error. 
But  the  Iattf:r  protest  and  declare  that  imagina- 
tion is  one  of  the  first  and  most  indispensable 
facultxp.s  of  the  scientist,  and  that  the  hypotheses 
to  which  they  give  birth,  even  though  they  be 
erroneous  and  able  to  survive  only  three  years, 
are  nevertheless  the  necessary  condition  of  all 
scientific  progress. 

If  the  communist  ideal  were  an  hypothesis 
undemonstrable  and  false  it  would  still  be  a  pro- 
pelling force  of  social  progress,  but  such  is  not 
the  case. 

The  hypothesis  in  science,  as  in  the  social 
field,  is  the  more  undemonstrable  and  susceptible 
of  error  in  proportion  as  the  data  contributing 


144  THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL 

to  its  elaboration  are  less  numerous  and  more 
uncertain.  Greek  science,  which  had  to  furnish 
a  conception  of  the  world  when  the  data  regard- 
ing the  phenomena  of  nature  were  of  the  most 
rudimentary,  was  obliged  to  resort  to  hypotheses 
which  for  boldness  and  intuitive  accuracy  are 
marvels  of  history  and  of  thought;  after  having 
admitted,  according  to  the  vulgar  opinion,  that 
tiie  earth  was  flat,  and  that  the  temple  of  Delphi 
was  situated  at  its  center,  they  put  forth  the 
hypothesis  of  its  spherical  form,  then  undemon- 
strable. 

Socialism,  which  dates  from  the  first  years 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  started,  like  Greek 
science,  from  hypotheses  the  more  erroneous, 
and  from  ideal  the  more  Utopian,  in  that  the  so- 
cial world  which  it  proposed  to  transform  was 
less  known;  and  at  that  epoch  could  not  be 
known  for  the  excellent  reason  that  it  was  in 
course  of  formation. 

The  machine  operated  by  steam  was  beginning 
to  edge  into  industry  where  the  tool,  managed 
by  the  artisan,  was  moved  by  human  power,  and 
in  some  rare  circumstances  by  animals,  wind  or 
waterfalls.  The  Socialist  thinkers,  as  Engels 
observes,  were  then  obliged  to  draw  from  their 
own  brain  the  social  ideal  which  they  could  not 
extract  from  the  tumultuous  economic  environ- 


THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL  145 

ment  in  full  course  of  transformation.  They 
grasped  again,  infusing  new  life  into  it,  the  com- 
munist ideal  which  has  slumbered  in  the  mind 
of  man  since  he  emerged  from  the  communism 
of  primitive  society  which  the  poetic  Greek  myth- 
ology calls  the  golden  age  and  which  has  awak- 
ened to  shine  here  and  there  with  a  glorious 
splendor  at  great  epochs  of  social  upheaval. 
They  sought,  then,  to  establish  communism,  not 
because  the  economic  environment  was  ready  for 
its  introduction,  but  because  men  were  miser- 
able, because  the  laws  of  justice  and  equalitv 
were  violated,  because  the  precepts  of  the  Christ 
could  not  be  followed  in  their  purity.  The  com- 
munistic ideal,  not  springing  from  economic 
reality,  was  then  but  an  unconscious  reminiscence 
of  a  prehistoric  past,  and  came  only  from  ideal- 
istic notions  upon  a  justice,  an  equality  and  a 
gospel  law  no  less  idealistic ;  it  is  then  idealistic 
in  the  second  degree,  and  consequently  Utopian. 
The  Socialists  of  the  first  half  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  who  rekindled  the  communist 
ideal,  had  the  rare  merit  of  giving  it  a  consist- 
ency less  idealistic.  They  spoke  little  of  the 
Christian  religion,  of  justice  and  of  equality ; 
Robert-  Owen  laid  the  responsibilities  of  social 
evils  upon  the  family,  property  and  religion; 
Charles  Fonrier  criticises  the  ideas  of  justice  and 


146  THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL 

morality  introduced  by  the  bourgeois  Revolution 
of  '89  with  incomparable  animation  and  irony. 
They  did  not  weep  over  the  misery  of  the  poor, 
but  left  that  to  Victor  Hugo  and  the  charlatans 
of  romanticism.  They  preached  the  social  prob- 
lem from  its  realistic  side,  the  only  side  from 
which  it  can  be  solved.  They  used  their  talents 
to  prove  that  a  social  organization  of  production 
would  succeed  in  satisfying  the  desires  of  all 
without  reducing  the  share  of  any,  not  even  that 
of  the  privileged  capitalist  class.  Meanwhile  the 
recent  application  of  steam  and  machinery  de- 
manded also  a  new  organization  of  labor,  and 
this  was  the  constant  concern  of  the  industrial 
bourgeoisie.  The  socialists  were  thus  pursuing 
the  same  end  as  the  industrials ;  bourgeois  and 
socialists  might  consequently  come  to  an  under- 
standing. We  therefore  find  in  the  socialist  sects 
of  that  epoch  industrials,  engineers  and  financi- 
ers who  in  the  second  half  of  the  century  cast 
away  their  sympathy  for  the  workers  and  occu- 
pied an  important  place  in  capitalist  society. 

The  socialism  of  that  epoch  could  not  under 
these  conditions  be  anything  else  than  pacific ; 
instead  of  entering  on  the  struggle  with  the 
capitalists,  the  socialists  thought  only  of  con- 
verting them  to  their  system  of  social  reform 
from  which  they  were  to  be  the  first  to  benefit. 


THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL  147 

They  proclaimed  the  association  of  capital,  in- 
telligence and  labor,  the  interests  of  which,  ac- 
cording to  them,  were  identical!  they  preached 
a  mutual  understanding  between  the  employer 
and  the  employed,  between  the  exploiter  and  the 
exploited ;  they  know  no  class  struggle ;  they 
condemned  strikes  and  all  political  agitation, 
especially  if  it  were  revolutionary ;  they  desired 
order  in  the  street  and  harmony  in  the  work- 
shop. They  demanded,  finally,  nothing  more 
than  was  desired  by  the  new  industrial  bour- 
geoisie. 

They  foresaw  that  industry,  strengthened  by 
the  motive  power  of  steam,  machinery  and  the 
concentration  of  the  instruments  of  labor,  would 
have  a  colossal  producing  power,  and  they  had 
the  simplicity  to  believe  that  the  capitalists  would 
content  themselves  with  taking  only  a  reasonable 
part  of  the  wealth  thus  created,  and  would  leave 
to  their  co-operators,  the  manual  and  intellectual 
laborers,  a  portion  sufficient  to  enable  them  to 
live  in  comfort.  This  socialism  was  marvellously 
agreeable  to  capital,  since  it  promised  an  in- 
crease of  wealth  and  advised  an  understanding 
between  the  laborer  and  the  employer.  It  re- 
cruited the  great  majority  of  its  adepts  in  the 
educational  hotbeds  of  the  bourgeoisie.     It  was 


148  THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL 

Utopian,  therefore  it  was  the  sociaHsm  of  the 
intellectuals. 

But  precisely  because  it  was  Utopian,  the  la- 
borers, in  constant  antagonism  with  their  em- 
ployers on  questions  of  labor  and  hours,  looked 
on  it  with  suspicion.  They  could  understand  no- 
thing of  this  socialism  which  condemned  strikes 
and  political  action  and  which  assumed  to  har- 
monize the  interests  of  capital  and  labor,  of  the 
exploiter  and  exploited.  They  kept  aloof  from 
the  socialists  and  gave  all  their  sympathies  to 
the  bourgeois  republicans,  because  they  were 
revolutionary.  They  joined  their  secret  societies 
and  climbed  with  them  upon  the  barricades  to 
make  riots  and  political  revolutions. 

Marx  and  Engels  took  socialism  at  the  point 
to  which  the  great  Utopians  had  brought  it,  but 
mstead  of  torturing  their  brains  to  improvise 
the  organization  of  labor  and  of  production,  they 
studied  that  which  was  already  created  by  the 
very  necessities  of  the  new  mechanical  industry 
which  had  arrived  at  a  degree  of  development 
sufficient  to  permit  its  power  and  its  tendency 
to  be  apparent.  Its  productivity  was  so  enorm- 
ous, as  Fourier  and  Saint  Simon  had  foreseen, 
that  it  was  capable  of  providing  abundantly  for 
the  normal  needs  of  all  the  members  of  society. 
This  was  the  first  time  in  historv  that  such  a 


THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL  149 

productive  power  had  been  observed,  and  it  was 
because  capitalist  production  could  satisfy  all 
needs,  and  for  that  reason  alone,  that  it  is  pos- 
sible to  reintroduce  communism,  that  is  to  say 
the  equal  participation  of  all  in  social  wealth, 
and  the  free  and  complete  development  of  the 
physical,  intellectual  and  moral  faculties.  Com- 
munism is  no  longer  a  Utopia  but  a  possibility. 

Alachinery  replaces  the  individualistic  produc- 
tion of  the  small  industry,  by  the  communistic 
production  of  the  capitalistic  factory,  but  prop- 
erty in  the  means  of  labor  has  remained  individ- 
ual, as  in  the  time  of  the  small  industry.  There 
is  then  a  contradiction  between  the  individual- 
istic mode  of  possession  and  the  communist  mode 
of  production  and  this  contradiction  translates 
itself  into  the  antagonism  between  the  laborer 
and  the  capitalist  employer.  The  producers,  who 
form  the  immense  majority  of  the  nation,  no 
longer  possess  the  instruments  of  labor,  the  pos- 
session of  which  is  centralized  in  the  idle  hands 
of  a  decreasing  minority.  The  social  problem 
imposed  by  mechanical  production  will  be  solved, 
as  the  social  problems  imposed  by  preceding 
modes  of  production  have  been  solved,  by  precip- 
itating the  evolution  begun  by  economic  force, 
by  finishing  the  expropriation  of  the  individual 
in  the  means    of  production,  by  giving    to  the 


i&.  THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL 

communistic  mode  of  production  the  commun- 
istic mode  of  possession  which  it  demands. 

The  communism  of  contemporary  socialists  no 
longer  proceeds,  like  that  of  former  times,  from 
the  cerebral  lucubrations  of  gifted  thinkers;  it 
proceeds  from  economic  reality,  it  is  the  final 
goal  of  the  economic  forces  which,  without  at- 
tracting the  attention  of  the  capitalists  and  their 
intellectuals,  have  fashioned  the  communistic 
mold  of  a  new  society,  the  coming  of  which  we 
only  have  to  hasten.  Communism,  then,  is  no 
longer  a  Utopian  hypothesis;  it  is  a  scientific 
ideal.  It  may  be  added  that  never  has  the  eco- 
nomic structure  of  any  society  been  better  and 
more  completely  analyzed  than  capitalist  society, 
and  that  never  was  a  social  ideal  conceived  with 
such  numerous  and  positive  data  as  the  com- 
munist idea  of  modern  socialism. 

Although  it  is  the  economic  forces  which  fash- 
ion men  at  the  pleasure  and  spur  them  to  ac- 
tion, and  although  these  constitute  the  myster- 
ious force  determining  the  great  currents  of  his- 
tory which  the  Christians  attribute  to  God,  and 
the  free-thinking  bourgeois  assign  to  Progress, 
to  Civilization,  to  the  Immortal  Principles  and 
other  similar  manitous,  worthy  of  savage  tribes, 
they  are  nevertheless  the  product  of  human  act- 
ivity.  Man,  who  created  them  and  brought  them 


THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL  151 

into  the  world,  has  thus  far  let  himself  be  guided 
by  them;  yet  now  that  he  has  understood  their 
nature  and  grasped  their  tendency,  he  can  act 
upon  their  evolution.  The  socialists  who  are  ac- 
cused of  being  stricken  by  Oriental  fatalism  and 
of  relying  upon  the  good  pleasure  of  economic 
forces  to  bring  to  light  the  communist  society 
instead  of  crossing  their  arms  like  the  fakirs  of 
official  Economics,  and  of  bending  the  knee  be- 
fore its  fundamental  dogma,  hisses  faire,  laissez 
passer,  propose  on  the  contrary  to  subdue  them, 
as  the  blind  forces  of  nature  have  been  subdued, 
and  force  them  to  do  good  to  men  instead  of 
leaving  them  to  work  misery  to  the  toilers  of 
civilization.  They  do  not  wait  for  their  ideal 
to  fall  from  heaven  as  the  Christians  hope  for 
the  grace  of  God,  and  the  capitalists  for  wealth ; 
they  prepare,  on  the  contrary,  to  realize  it,  not 
by  appealing  to  the  intelligence  of  the  capital- 
ist class  and  to  its  sentiments  of  justice  and  hu- 
manity, but  by  fighting  it,  by  expropriating  it 
from  its  political  power,  which  protects  its  eco- 
nomic despotism. 

Socialism,  because  it  possesses  a  social  ideal, 
has  in  consequence  a  criticism  of  its  own.  Every 
class  which  struggles  for  its  enfranchisement 
seeks  to  realize  a  social  ideal,  in  complete  oppO' 
sJtion  with  that  of  the  ruling  class.    The  strug- 


152  THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL 

gle  is  waged  at  first  in  the  ideological  world  be- 
fore the  physical  shock  of  the  revolutionary  bat- 
tle. It  thus  begins  the  criticism  of  the  ideas  of 
the  society  which  must  be  revolted  against,  for 
'^the  ideas  of  the  ruling  class  are  the  ideas  of 
society,"  or  these  ideas  are  the  intellectual  re- 
flection of  its  material  interests. 

Thus,  the  wealth  of  the  ruling  class  is  pro- 
duced by  slave  labor;  religion,  ethics,  philosophy 
and  literature  agree  in  authorizing  slavery.  The 
ugly  God  of  the  Jews  and  Christianity  strikes 
with  his  curse  the  progeny  of  Ham,  that  it  may 
furnish  slaves.  Aristotle,  the  encyclopedic  thinker 
of  Greek  philosophy,  declares  that  slaves  are 
predestined  by  nature  and  that  no  rights  exist 
for  them,  for  there  can  be  no  rights  except  be- 
tween equals.  Euripides  in  his  tragedies  preaches 
the  doctrine  of  servile  morality;  St.  Paul,  St. 
Augustine  and  the  Church  j:each  slaves  submis- 
sion to  their  earthly  masters  that  they  may  de- 
serve the  favor  of  their  heavenly  master;  Chris- 
tian civilization  introduced  slavery  into  America 
and  maintains  it  there  until  economic  phenom- 
ena prove  that  slave  labor  is  a  method  of  exploi- 
tation more  costly  and  less  profitable  than  free 
labor. 

At  the  epoch  when  the  Greco-Roman  civiliza- 
tion was  dissolving,  when  the  labor  of  artisans 


THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL  153 

and  free  workers  began  to  be  substituted  for 
slave  labor,  pagan  religion,  philosophy  and  liter- 
ature decided  to  accord  them  certain  rights. 
The  same  Euripides  who  advised  the  slave  to 
lose  his  personality  in  that  of  the  master  does 
not  wish  him  to  be  despised.  "There  is  nothing 
shameful  in  slavery  but  the  name,"  says  the  peda- 
gogue in  Ion,  "the  slave,  moreover,  is  not  in- 
ferior to  the  free  man  when  he  has  a  noble 
heart."  The  mysteries  of  Eleusis  and  of  Or- 
phism,  like  Christianity,  which  continues  their 
work,  admit  slaves  among  their  initiated  and 
promise  them  liberty,  equality  and  happiness 
after  death. 

The  dominating  class  of  the  Middle  Ages  be- 
ing military,  the  Christian  religion  and  social 
ethics  condemned  lending  money  at  interest,  and 
covered  the  lender  with  infamy;  to  take  interest 
for  money  loaned  was  then  something  so  ignom- 
inious that  the  Jewish  race,  obliged  to  specialize 
itself  in  the  trade  of  money,  still  bears  the  shame 
of  it.  But  to-day,  now  that  the  Christians  have 
become  Jews,  and  the  ruling  class  lives  on  the 
interest  of  its  capital,  the  trade  of  the  lender 
at  interest  is  the  most  honorable,  the  most  de- 
sirable, the  most  exclusive. 

The  oppressed  class,  although  the  ideology  of 
the  oppressing  class  is  imposed  upon  it,  never- 


154  THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL 

theless  elaborates  religious,  ethical  and  political 
ideas  corresponding  to  its  condition  of  life ; 
vague  and  secret  at  first,  they  gain  in  precision 
and  force  in  proportion  as  the  oppressed  class 
takes  definite  form  and  acquires  the  conscious- 
ness of  its  social  utility  and  of  its  strength ;  and 
the  hour  of  its  emancipation  is  near  when  its 
conception  of  nature  and  of  society  opposes  it- 
self openly  and  boldly  to  that  of  the  ruling  class. 
The  economic  conditions  in  which  the  bour- 
geois moves  and  evolves  make  of  it  a  class  es- 
sentially religious.  Christianity  is  its  work  and 
will  last  as  long  as  this  class  shall  rule  society. 
Seven  or  eight  centuries  before  Christ,  when 
the  bourgeoisie  had  its  birth  in  the  commercial 
and  industrial  cities  of  the  Mediterranean  sea, 
we  may  observe  the  elaboration  of  a  new  reli- 
gion; the  gods  of  paganism  created  by  warrior 
tribes  could  not  be  suited  to  a  class  consecrated 
to  the  production  and  sale  of  merchandise.  Mys- 
terious cults  (the  mysteries  of  the  Cabiri,  of 
Demeter,  of  Dionysus,  etc.)  revive  the  religi- 
ous traditions  of  the  prehistoric  matriarchical 
period ;  the  idea  of  a  soul  and  its  existence  after 
death  revive;  the  idea  of  posthumous  punish- 
ments and  rewards  to  compensate  for  acts  of  so- 
cial injustice  are  introduced,  etc.  These  religious 
elements,  combined  with  the  intellectual  data  of 


THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL  155 

Greek  philosophy,  contribute  to  form  Christian- 
ity, the  reHgion,  par  excellence,  of  societies  which 
have  for  their  foundation  property  belonging  to 
the  individual  and  the  class  which  enrich  them- 
selves by  the  exploitation  of  wage  labor.  For 
fifteen  centuries  all  the  movements  of  the  hour 
geoisie,  either  for  organization,  or  for  selfeman- 
cipation,  or  for  the  acquisition  of  power  have 
been  accompanied  and  complicated  by  religious 
crises ;  but  always  Christianity  more  or  less  mod- 
ified remains  the  religion  of  society.  The  revolu- 
tionists of  1789,  who  in  the  ardor  of  the  struggle 
promised  themselves  to  de-Christianize  France, 
were  eager  when  the  bourgeoisie  were  victorious 
to  raise  again  the  altars  they  had  overthrown  and 
to  reintroduce  the  cult  that  they  had  proscribed. 
The  economic  environment  which  produces 
the  proletariat  relieves  it  on  the  contrary  from 
every  idea  of  sentiment.  There  is  not  seen  either 
in  Europe  nor  in  America  among  the  laboring 
masses  of  the  great  industries  any  anxiety  to 
elaborate  a  religion  to  replace  Christianity,  nor 
any  desire  to  reform  it.  The  economic  and  polit- 
ical organizatons  of  the  working  class  are  com- 
pletely uninterested  as  to  any  doctrinal  discus- 
sion of  religious  and  spiritual  dogmas,  although 
they  combat  the  priests  of  all  cults  because  they 
are  the  lackeys  of  the  capitalist  class. 


156  THE  SOCIALIST  IDEAL 

The  victory  of  the  proletariat  will  deliver  hu- 
manity from  the  nightmare  of  religion.  The  be- 
lief in  superior  beings  to  explain  the  natural 
world  and  the  social  inequality,  and  to  prolong 
the  dominion  of  the  ruling  class,  and  the  belief 
in  the  posthumous  existence  of  the  soul  to  re- 
compense the  inequality  of  fate  will  have  no 
more  justification  once  man,  who  has  already 
grasped  the  general  causes  of  the  phenomena  of 
nature,  shall  live  in  a  communist  society  from 
whence  shall  have  disappeared  the  inequality  and 
the  injustice  of  capitalistic  society. 

The  militant  socialists,  following  the  example 
of  the  encyclopedists  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
have  to  make  a  merciless  criticism  of  the  eco- 
nomic, political,  historical,  philosophical,  moral 
and  religious  ideas  of  the  capitalist  class  in  order 
to  prepare  in  all  spheres  of  thought  the  triumph 
of  the  new  ideology  which  the  proletariat  intro- 
duces into  the  world. 


THE  RIGHTS  OF  THE  HORSE  AND 
THE  RIGHTS  OF  MAN 

Capitalist  Civilization  has  endowed  the  wage- 
worker  with  the  metaphysical  Rights  of  Man, 
but  this  is  only  to  rivet  him  more  closely  and 
more  firmly  to  his  economic  duty.  _ 

"I  make  you  free,"  so  speak  the  Rights  of  Man 
to  the  laborer,  ''free  to  earn  a  wretched  living 
and  turn  your  employer  into  a  millionaire ;  free 
to  sell  him  your  liberty  for  a  mouthful  of  bread. 
He  will  imprison  you  ten  hours  or  twelve  hours 
in  his  workshops ;  he  will  not  let  you  go  till  you 
are  wearied  to  the  marrow  of  your  bones,  tillj 
you  have  just  enough  strength  left  to  gulp  down' 
your  soup  and  sink  into  a  heavy  sleep.  You  have 
but  one  of  your  rights  that  you  may  not  sell,' 
and  that  is  the  right  to  pay  taxes.  "-t 

Progress  and  Civilization  may  be  hard  on 
wage-working  humanity,  but  they  have  all  a 
mother's  tenderness  for  the  animals  which  stupid 
bipeds  call  "lower." 


158  THE  RIGHTS  OF  THE  HORSE 

Civilization  has  especially  favored  the  equine 
race :  it  would  be  too  great  a  task  to  go  through 
the  long  list  of  its  benefactions;  I  will  name  but 
a  few,  of  general  notoriety,  that  I  may  awaken 
and  inflame  the  passionate  desires  of  the  work- 
ers, now  torpid  in  their  misery. 

Horses  are  divided  into  distinct  classes.  The 
equine  aristocracy  enjoys  so  many  and  so  op- 
pressive privileges,  that  if  the  human-faced 
brutes  which  serve  them  as  jockeys,  trainers, 
stable  valets  and  grooms  were  not  morally  de- 
graded to  the  point  of  not  feeling  their  shame, 
they  would  have  rebelled  against  their  lords  and 
masters,  whom  they  rub  down,  groom,  brush 
and  comb,  also  making  their  beds,  cleaning  up 
their  excrements  and  receiving  bites  and  kicks 
by  way  of  thanks. 

Aristocratic  horses,  like  capitalists,  do  not 
work;  and  when  they  exercise  themselves  in  the 
fields  they  look  disdainfully,  with  a  coupon- 
clipper's  contempt,  upon  the  human  animals 
which  plow  and  seed  the  lands,  mow  and  rake 
the  meadows,  to  provide  them  with  oats,  clover, 
timothy  and  other  succulent  plants. 

These  four-footed  favorites  of  Civilization 
command  such  social  influence  that  they  impose 
their  wills  upon  the  capitalists,  their  brothers  in 
privilege ;  they  force  the  loftiest  of  them  to  come 


THE  RIGHTS  OF  THE  HORSE  159 

with  their  beautiful  ladies  and  take  tea  in  the 
stables,  inhaling  the  acrid  perfumes  of  their 
solid  and  liquid  evacuations.  And  when  these 
lords  consent  to  parade  in  public,  they  require 
from  ten  to  twenty  thousand  men  and  women  to 
stack  themselves  up  on  uncomfortable  seats,  un- 
der the  broiling  sun,  to  admire  their  exquisitely 
chiseled  forms  and  their  feats  of  running  and 
leaping.  They  respect  none  of  the  social  dignities 
before  which  the  votaries  of  the  Rights  of  Man 
bow  in  reverence.  At  Chantilly  not  long  ago  one 
of  the  favorites  for  the  grand  prize  launched  a 
kick  at  the  king  of  Belgium,  because  it  did  not 
like  the  looks  of  his  head.  His  royal  majesty, 
who  adores  horses,  murmured  an  apology  and 
withdrew. 

It  is  fortunate  that  these  horses,  who  can  count 
more  authentic  ancestors  than  the  houses  of  Or- 
leans and  Hohenzollern,  have  not  been  corrupted 
by  their  high  social  station :  had  they  taken  it 
into  their  heads  to  rival  the  capitalists  in  aesth- 
etic pretentions,  profligate  luxury  and  depraved 
tastes,  such  as  wearing  lace  and  diamonds,  and 
drinking  champagne  and  Chateau-Margaux,  a 
blacker  misery  and  more  overwhelming  drudgery 
would  be  impending  over  the  class  of  wage- 
workers. 

Thrice  happy    is    it  for  proletarian  humanity 


160  THE  RIGHTS  OF  THE   HORSE 

that  these  equine  aristocrats  have  not  taken  the 
fancy  of  feeding  upon  human  flesh,  like  the  old 
Bengal  tigers  which  rove  around  the  villages  of 
India  to  carry  off  women  and  children ;  if  un- 
happily the  horses  had  been  man-eaters,  the  capi- 
talists, who  can  refuse  them  nothing,  would  have 
built  slaughter-houses  for  wage-workers,  where 
they  could  carve  out  and  dress  boy  sirloins,  wo- 
man hams  and  girl  roasts  to  satisfy  their  an- 
thropophagic  tastes. 

The  proletarian  horses,  not  so  well  endowed, 
have  to  work  for  their  peck  of  oats,  but  the  capi- 
talist class,  through  deference  for  the  aristocrats 
of  the  equine  race,  concedes  to  the  working 
horses  rights  that  are  far  more  solid  and  real 
than  those  inscribed  in  the  "Rights  of  Man." 

The  first  of  rights,  the  right  to  existence, 
which  no  civilized  society  will  recognize  for  la- 
borers, is  possessed  by  horses. 

The  colt,  even  before  his  birth,  while  still  in 
the  fetus  state,  begins  to  enjoy  the  right  to  ex- 
istence ;  his  mother,  when  her  pregnancy  has 
scarcely  begun,  is  discharged  from  all  work  and 
sent  into  the  country  to  fashion  the  new  being 
in  peace  and  comfort ;  she  remains  near  him  to 
suckle  him  and  teach  him  to  choose  the  delicious 
grasses  of  the  meadow,  in  which  he  gambols  un- 
til he  is  grown. 


THE  RIGHTS  OF  THE   HORSE  161 

The  moralists  and  politicians  of  the  "Rights  of 
Man"  think  it  would  be  monstrous  to  grant 
such  rights  to  the  laborers;  I  raised  a  tempest 
in  the  Chamber  of  Deputies  when  I  asked  that 
women,  two  months  before  and  two  months  after 
confinement,  should  have  the  right  and  the  means 
to  absent  themselves  from  the  factory.  My  pro- 
position upset  the  ethics  of  civilization  and  shook 
the  capitalist  order.  What  an  abominable  abomi- 
nation— to  demand  for  babies  the  rights  of  colts. 

As  for  the  young  proletarians,  they  can  scarce- 
ly trot  on  their  little  toes  before  they  are  con- 
demned to  hard  labor  in  the  prisons  of  capital- 
ism, while  the  colts  develop  freely  under  kindly 
Nature ;  care  is  taken  that  they  be  completely 
formed  before  they  are  set  to  work,  and  their 
tasks  are  proportioned  to  their  strength  with  a 
tender  care. 

This  care  on  the  part  of  the  capitalists  follows 
them  all  through  their  lives.  We  may  still  recall 
the  noble  indignation  of  the  bourgeois  press 
when  it  learned  that  the  omnibus  company  was 
using  peat  and  tannery  waste  in  its  stalls  as  a 
substitute  for  straw :  to  think  of  the  unhappy 
horses  having  such  poor  litters !  The  more  del- 
icate souls  of  the  bourgeoisie  have  in  every  capi- 
talist country  organized  societies  for  the  protec- 
tion of  animals,  in  order  to  prove  that  they  can 


162  THE  RIGHTS  OF  THE  HORSE 

not  be  excited  by  the  fate  of  the  small  victims 
of  industry,  Schopenhauer,  the  bourgeois  philo- 
sopher, in  whom  was  incarnated  so  perfectly  the 
gross  egoism  of  the  philistine,  could  not  hear 
the  cracking  of  a  whip  without  his  heart  being 
torn  by  it. 

This  same  omnibus  company,  which  works  its 
laborers  from  fourteen  to  sixteen  hours  a  day, 
requires  from  its  dear  horses  only  five  to  seven 
hours.  It  has  bought  green  meadows  in  which 
they  may  recuperate  from  fatigue  or  indisposi- 
tion. Its  policy  is  to  expend  more  for  the  enter- 
tainment of  a  quadruped  than  for  paying  the 
wages  of  a  biped.  It  has  never  occurred  to  any 
legislator  nor  to  any  fanatical  advocate  of  the 
"Rights  of  Man"  to  reduce  the  horse's  daily  pit- 
tance in  order  to  assure  him  a  retreat  that  would 
be  of  service  to  him  only  after  his  death. 

The  Rights  of  Horses  have  not  been  posted 
up;  they  are  "unwritten  rights,"  as  Socrates 
called  the  laws  implanted  by  Nature  in  the  con- 
sciousness of  all  men. 

The  horse  has  shown  his  wisdom  in  content- 
ing himself  with  these  rights,  with  no  thought 
of  demanding  those  of  the  citizen ;  he  has  judged 
that  he  would  have  been  as  stupid  as  man  if  he 
had  sacrificed  his  mess  of  lentils  for  the  meta- 
physical banquet  of  Rights  to  Revolt,  to  Equal- 


THE  RIGHTS  OF  THE  HORSE  163 

ity,  to  Liberty,  and  other  trivialities  which  to 
the  proletariat  are  about  as  useful  as  a  cautery 
on  a  wooden  leg. 

Civilization,  though  partial  to  the  equine  race, 
has  not  shown  herself  indifferent  to  the  fate  of 
the  other  animals.  Sheep,  like  canons,  pass  their 
days  in  pleasant  and  plentiful  idleness ;  they  are 
fed  in  the  stable  on  barley,  lucerne,  rutabagas 
and  other  roots,  raised  by  wage-workers ;  shep- 
herds conduct  them  to  feed  in  fat  pastures,  and 
when  the  sun  parches  the  plain,  they  are  carried 
to  where  they  can  browse  on  the  tender  grass 
of  the  mountains. 

The  Church,  which  has  burned  her  heretics, 
and  regrets  that  she  can  not  again  bring  up  her 
faithful  sons  in  the  love  of  "mutton,"  represents 
Jesus,  under  the  form  of  a  kind  shepherd,  bear- 
ing upon  his  shoulders  a  weary  lamb. 

True,  the  love  for  the  ram  and  the  ewe  is  in 
the  last  analysis  only  the  love  for  the  leg  of  mut- 
ton and  the  cutlet,  just  as  the  Liberty  of  the 
Rights  of  Man  is  nothing  but  the  slavery  of  the 
wage-worker,  since  our  Jesuitical  Civilization  al- 
ways disguises  capitalist  exploitation  in  eternal 
principles  and  bourgeois  egoism  in  noble  senti- 
ments ;  yet  at  least  the  bourgeois  tends  qnd  fat- 
tens the  sheep  up  to  the  day  of  the  sacrifice, 
while  he  seizes  the  laborer  still  warm  from  the 


164  THE  RIGHTS  OF  THE  HORSE 

workshop  and  lean  from  toil  to  send  him  to  the 
shambels  of  Tonquin  or  Madagascar. 

Laborers  of  all  crafts,  you  who  toil  so  hard 
to  create  your  poverty  in  producing  the  wealth 
of  the  capitalists,  arise,  arise !  Since  the  buf- 
foons of  parliament  unfurl  the  Rights  of  Man, 
do  you  boldly  demand  for  yourselves,  your  wives 
and  your  children  the  Rights  of  the  Horse. 


THE  END. 


University  of  California 

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